I know that Theodore Roethke is not referring to the aftermath of eye surgery in this famous line. But when a retinal repair in late October made reading for any length of time painful to me, I turned my inner eye to audiobooks.

Back in the 90's, my ex-husband and I listened to audiobooks on long car trips. I remember laughing with Bill Bryson's A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail (and thinking that the Little Debbie snack cakes beloved by Bryson's Falstaffian trail buddy were the perfect road food).

We enjoyed Caleb Carr's twisting and twisted fin de siecle New York of The Alienist so much that we finished the audiobook sitting on the front porch of the Victorian house we owned in those days--while shadows, literal and figurative, lengthened.

But watch out for Michael Ondaatje's overly lyrical The English Patient. This audiobook should come with a narcolepsy warning! I had to shout at my then husband to wake up as his eyes closed and he loosened his grip on the wheel. (I was nearly asleep myself.)

This time around, I lay in bed listening to novels in the public domain from Librivox (www.librivox.org). If you want to be pulled into a book by the ears, there is nothing like a Victorian novel. The experience is similar to driving the roads of West Virginia, where lush foliage gives way to tin-roofed towns, brief straightaways are followed by a breathtaking series of hairpin curves, and faces seem haunted by beauty or evil--or both.

I started with an orgy of classics from my childhood: Louisa May Alcott's Little Men and Jo's Boys, Lucy Maud Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables, Jane Austen's madly funny Love and Friendship. Then I ventured to Alcott's thrillers--which she secretly preferred to her children's books. In Behind a Mask, Or, a Woman's Power, a worn-out actress beguiles a sorry crew of aristocrats into thinking she is a charming governess of nineteen.
The Mysterious Key and What It Opened rattles some family skeletons--and how!

But these diversions were only the prelude to Wilkie Collins. In the quartet of his best novels--bookended by The Woman in White and The Moonstone--this friend of Charles Dickens displays amazing plot chops, but also creates fascinating and well-rounded characters, including strong women and sensitive, intelligent people of color in an era of colonialism, servitude, and hypocritical proprieties. Wild rides from start to finish.

One note of caution: as Librivox is staffed by volunteers, the readers range from professional to competent to poor. A few times, I had to squint over print chapters when the listening got rough...but I'm still going.

P.S. My literary clock is running a week behind, but 20 copies of Under the Kaufmann's Clock: Fiction, Poems, and Photographs of Pittsburgh from my recent Goodreads giveaway are in the mail to the winners--whom I hope will be moved to rate and review the book.