The Sonic Transformation of Our Favorite Books

and a long-overdue tribute to some cornerstones of my early reading life

One of the most life-giving practices available to us in 2023, in my humble-at-the-moment opinion, is revisiting formatively favorite books via an extraordinary audio version, the kind so well done it makes you feel like you’re immersed in a movie adaptation that didn’t make any stupid changes.

I’ve done this with a lot of my favorite novels and I get excited about it every time, but in the past two days I’ve discovered how soul-restoring it is to do this with the books I read when I was young, very young. It didn’t occur to me, for example, until everyone started talking about the film adaptation of Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret, to investigate the audio offerings of my favorite Judy Blume books, Just as Long as We’re Together and its just-as-poignant companion, Here’s to You, Rachel Robinson.

I had not read either book since 5th grade, back when 13-year-old protagonists were the Cool Older Girls I wanted to be, and I can’t believe how emotionally resonant and fiercely real and genuinely funny these books still are. I’d once assumed that any book that uses the word “hunk” couldn’t be relevant to 2023, but if anything, culture-at-large has finally caught up with them. As an adult and former English teacher, what leaps out at me is how multidimensional the adult characters are: in addition to the brutally authentic and emotionally compelling teenage struggles that are the center of the stories, the parents are realistic and multifaceted, the TEACHERS are realistic and multifaceted! That shows a level of dedication to the true lives of people that a lot of talented writers are afraid to adopt, a determination to truly observe that some people never learn to do.

I’d been so affected by Blume’s creative worlds as a youngster that when, two days ago, I first re-encountered the name “Jeremy” I actually squealed “JEREMY DRAGON OH MY GOD” and screamed, legit screamed, because he was just as real to my proto-boy-crazy mind as

Atreyu from The Neverending Story or

Devon Sawa aka live-action Casper, the boy we lost before he became the Friendly Ghost. (I know!)

It’s wild how the only things that date these books are just sweetly nostalgic, like kids playing card games on long road trips or looking out the window when bored during class. (Who else reads “set the phone back in its cradle” and CRIES I know I can’t be the only one). Lots of magazines. Sassy mentioned by name. And the 10-year-old boy that’s the thoughtful little brother of the main character could be any 10-year-old boy from 1987 til now, dated only by his name, Bruce.

So after I listened to both of those books I thought “Holy shit, there have to be Babysitters Club audiobooks right?” RIGHT. It’s a whole thing, in fact: they cast specific narrators for each iconic girl and — because every book is in the first-person but the narrators change — the Claudia narrator always reads Claudia’s books, the Stacey narrator always reads Stacey’s books, etc. It’s a journey. Superfans might share my sorrow that we don’t get any Super Specials, Mysteries, or Portraits, but c’est la vie. More to the melancholy point, there is almost no representation on Planet Audiobook of the saucy universe that was TRULY near and dear to my romance-loving child-heart, the adventures of Jessica and Elizabeth Wakefield, aka the Sweet Valley twins.

There’s a recent audio serial-story involving the twins and their friend groups 10 years after they graduated high school, but somebody did not consult me and should have, because if there’s one thing I remain an authority on it is the even saucier goings-on at Sweet Valley University, where we already learned what our heroines got up to as legal adults! The covers still make my heart leap even now:

Jessica and her identical twin sister Elizabeth look exactly the way I wanted to look when I was a kid, hence countless hours of untold vicarious living. And when Lila Fowler got married in a crazy elopement to an Italian count, I flipped the fuck out, hyperventilating at my parents’ coffeehouse as though this were news from my own best friend. “I got married, Jess!” Then the count dies in a freak water-skiing accident and Lila Fowler hooks up with BRUCE PATMAN! OF ALL PEOPLE!

As you can tell I’m still not over any of it and given that it’s been over 30 years I doubt that I’ll ever be.

I would love to write characters with half the staying-power that Anne M. Martin, Judy Blume, and Francine Pascal’s creations have. Martin and Pascal were also blessed with a talented team of ghost writers, and I do mean blessed, because even the most prolific among us cannot produce the scores of sub-series with equal character-integrity that The Babysitters Club and Sweet Valley High-et-al afforded. Around 2018 I revisited one of my favorite BSC books that I found for a dollar in the little bookstore section of the Salinas Public Library, and I laughed out loud so often and felt so impressed by its real-ness that I tracked down the (straight dude!) ghost-writer to tell him how much even as an adult I enjoyed this book.

When he wrote me back with his profuse thanks, he said that one of the challenges he had going in was that he knew how integral outfits/fashion were to the Babysitter’s Club (if you know you know, but feel free to sign up for my workshop on the subject), because he himself was not a Fashion Guy. So he took up a study, he said, of his wife’s catalogues and magazines, thinking through what kinds of personalities showed through outfits and asking heretofore unwondered questions about what made an outfit fashionable.

Nobody does it alone.

Check me out, all at peace and shit. These books restoring my spirit yet again.

Oil painting by the immortal illustrator of the BSC covers, Hodges Soileau. Of course Kristy is in front, Mary Anne is holding tight to the safety bar, and Claudia and Stacey, in back, are ready for anything.