Books: Spoken word

Garrison Keillor reads his own abridgement of Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn (Penguin, 3hrs 15mins, pounds 8.99), "keeping the parts I loved as a boy" but taking the liberty of "lopping off the last third of the book" and Tom Sawyer's role in it. Twain would, I think, have forgiven him for providing modern listeners with a faithful taster of one of the funniest and most disconcertingly eccentric books ever written.

Alan Bennett can be cruel and fond in the same sentence. He reads his latest story, The Clothes They Stood Up In (BBC, 2hrs 20mins, pounds 8.99) with evident relish in his mots justes. It is a surreal tale of how the theft of the entire contents of their St John's Wood flat shakes up the lives of a small-minded solicitor and his downtrodden wife forever.