The Unfinished Harauld Hughes

I used to listen to a lot more audiobooks, I would walk my dog listening to them. Unfortunately they have been supplanted by the podcast. I listen to about 25 new podcasts per week while working and after work while I play video games, but only in times when the video games don’t have engaging dialog.

I was doing this on Sunday when I realised that when I’ve finished my podcast slate for the week, rather than dipping into the backlog of a particular podcast, I could be reading a book!

I tried this with the very next book on my to-read list: The Unfinished Harauld Hughes by Richard Ayoade, which I listened to until the end, for about four hours straight.

The book is a fictional diary about Ayoade making an equally fictional documentary about an even fictional-er writer named Harauld Hughes. It’s a great satire of these such documentaries, the people who appear in them and the stories they try to tell. There’s a central mystery that gets solved at the end via a revelation from an illusive contributor. That sort of thing.

It’s very clever and witty in it’s writing, and the characters in the documentary and the crew are melodramatic, hyperbolic and well-drawn. In a way it reminded me of Ayoade’s long-time collaborator Matthew Holness’ work as Garth Marenghi.

The audiobook is a great way to read this, it features a lot of famous faces including Noel Fielding, David Mitchell, Stephen Merchant, and Sally Hawkins. I think in future it’s a great way to hear books that were written by, or read by, famous faces (looking at you, Dickens).