FILTH

Never a week goes by without another shoal of books on tape landing on the desk: classics, travel, poetry, bonkbuster... Just occasionally something out of the ordinary turns up, like Lilliput Press's four-cassette reading of Finnegan's Wake (abridged, naturally) in a boxed set with accompanying 64-page booklet (pounds 19.99). Whatever you do, don't swap it with your Paul McKenna hypnotherapy tapes.

Most top-selling tales aren't nearly so cerebral. The Talking Bookshop in London reports that their "adult" list is selling well, with such pulse- throbbing titles as Ian McShane on Tropic of Cancer and My Life and Loves read by Leslie Grantham. Leslie Grantham? Or curl up with theatrical superman Steven Berkoff, giving Sexus a bit of clipped menace (Prelude pounds 14.99). Book News has it on good authority that you can get a powerful sexual charge just from listening to Mr Berkoff's answering machine.

Random House, meanwhile, has put out Nicholson Baker's pervy The Fermata, read by American actor Will Paton. What about a audio version of Baker's telephone sex novel Vox with books-on-tape supremo Martin Jarvis and voice- over queen Miriam Margolyes as the horny conversationalists?

8 The Lilliput Press, 4 Rosemount Terrace, Arbour Hill, Dublin 7, 003531 6711647.

8 The Talking Bookshop, 11 Wigmore St, W1. 0171 491 4117