Today I did something I hadn't done in over a year: I went to work without a book in my bag. It was a conscious decision. Instead, I took a notebook (thinking the lack of something to read would inspire me to actually write), and my iPod, recently loaded with The Magnetic Fields, Wilco, Mekons, and last week's episode of This American Life.

Storytellers along for the ride.

I was raised on radio; Fred Waring's Little Orley was on a loop from the old brown speakers at my grandparents' house, and hearing the All Things Considered theme music still makes my knees wobble. I spent three months in London without a television; Radio Four was a constant companion on those pub-free nights curled up next to our flimsy, plastic, Argos-purchased radio. (Pub-free = broke.)

But these stories, no matter how cheap the player, were amazing. And it ushered in a side of adulthood I'd been waiting for: the casual shift from music to words. Long after he'd introduced me to PJ Harvey and Elastica, John Peel won a new place in my heart with Home Truths. And even later, my geeked-out love for bands became my geeked-out love for Terry Gross band interviews.

The faceless storytelling of radio has a way of making me feel involved at the heart of the tale or investigation, that television can't compete with. Or books, for that matter. Just voices, detached and buzzing around my ear, my mind trying to find a body for them.

And these voices move me. Like the Christmas morning I spent weeping into the bedsheets over the BBC broadcast of a WWII transatlantic phone call. It wasn't just what they were saying — it was the sound of their voices.

Today, the emotion of the story being told by the family of kidnapped youngster legend Bobby Dunbar was hitting the same emotional soft spot. As the bus rounded the corner of 72nd and Broadway and the story came to its resolution, I began to tear up. I raised my hand to my eyes, shielding them from fellow passengers. Lest they think I was some sort of troubled woman. The puffy boy sitting next to me shifted in his seat and thumped his leg against mine, and the temporary annoyance of his strange aggressive contact stemmed the flow at its source. (Replaced with the distinct urge to elbow him right back. Then they'd really think I was troubled.) But the emotion wasn't lost; I felt the trueness of those voices well into the rest of my day.

Again, it wasn't simply the nature of the story being told, but how it was told. A turn of phrase. The tone in an elderly voice. It reminded me how important actual voices are in storytelling, and how sometimes I get too lost in setting a scene to remember to state the facts. To let the voices come through. As obsessed as I am with nostalgia, sometimes the truth of the past gets lost in the overly-mythical exposition. Analysis of the facts, true documentary, is often far more compelling. (Maud's Weekend Ancestry, an examination of her family history through letters and photographs, immediately springs to mind.)

Several years back at one of my family reunions, we sat in a dining room at the Mohican State Park Lodge, wiping barbecue sauce from the corners of our mouths, and one by one the elders in the family began to tell stories. Stories of the night the barn burned down. Stories of their little brother who died too young for a few of them to remember. I found a pad of paper supplied by the lodge and began to write down some of what they were saying. But I couldn't keep up. My chicken scratch notes didn't do the nature of their speech justice, a particular turn of phrase, Uncle Dave's molasses accent, the shift of tone whenever one of them mentioned their mother. I couldn't write that down.

For this year's reunion, I'll think I'll bring a tape recorder. So I can bring them back with me, let their voices buzz around my ear for a bit longer. Make believe for a moment that their stories are radio stories. And leave my book at home.