Danny Bate Audiobooks

Why Q Needs U: a spelling question opened out into ten hours of language

1 audiobook reviewed

★ 4.4/5 average

150 listener ratings

Who is Danny Bate?

Q is never alone in written English, and almost nobody stops to ask why. Why Q Needs U makes a whole book of that unexamined habit, a puzzle anyone who has ever written a sentence has walked past without noticing, and our catalogue files the answer across two shelves at once: education and learning, and politics and society.

That pairing is the interesting part. It suggests a writer for whom language is never merely technical, and for whom the way a thing came to be spelled carries a history of contact and accident along with it. Danny Bate takes the long route through that history rather than the quick one.

The clearest signal of all sits in the credits. Author and narrator are the same name here, and a book about how English looks and sounds gains a great deal from being delivered by the person who wrote it.

Danny Bate in audiobooks

Ten hours and more is generous for a single question, and a fair indication that the question was never the small one it first appeared to be. Listeners have returned a strong score, and enough of them have voted for that score to carry real weight.

Reading a book of this kind aloud is not a neutral decision. Pronunciation, stress and the small comic timing that language writing rewards all land differently in the author’s own voice, and Danny Bate takes the microphone personally.

It works equally well as a commute companion or as an evening listen taken a chapter at a time. Have a look at what is gathered below.