Adults Read Aloud, Too

Some of the books I've read aloud with grown-ups

True confession: The first time I read Moby Dick, I hated it. The second time, I loved it. What was the difference? Time, purpose, and community.

The first time I was in high school. I had chosen the novel from a list of independent reading books because I was a reader, it was a classic, and I felt I should. Then I put off reading it until the weekend before it was due. After all, I was a reader—it would be no problem to have to sit and read a book all weekend. That was before I realized that everything I was familiar with from the book as plot was covered in 50 pages. That left another 350 pages of chapters with titles like (I kid you not) “Of the Whiteness of the Whale.” Who cared? I had to have this read by Monday!

The second time was 3 decades later. A high school daughter struggled with insomnia. Not wanting to leave her up alone in the middle of the night, I revived our elementary tradition of a bedtime story. Since the point was to get sleepy, we decided to go for the classics (no cliffhangers or thrillers allowed). And do you know what? It wasn’t boring. In fact, it was thoroughly enjoyable. We read as I imagine much of the original audience did: for an evening’s communal entertainment, one person reading aloud while the others mended a harness or knitted warm socks. But we had no pages due tomorrow—we had infinite time. The point was not to finish, but to while away the time between bedtime and falling asleep. So every time we had a question, or the text made us think of something, we’d stop and talk about it. Sometimes we did more talking than reading. And that was fine. We’d been successful: we’d passed the time, and we’d enjoyed each other and the book. 

One discussion I particularly remember, because from then on we frequently alluded to “the luxurious discomforts of the rich.” (Isn’t that a great oxymoron—luxurious discomfort?) The passage described the wonderful feeling we were so familiar with on a winter night in our Tokyo house burrowed under warm quilts without central heat:   

…[T]ruly to enjoy bodily warmth, some small part of you must be cold, for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself. If you flatter yourself that you are all over comfortable, and have been so a long time, then you cannot be said to be comfortable any more. But if, like Queequeg and me in the bed, the tip of your nose or the crown of your head be slightly chilled, why then, indeed, in the general consciousness you feel most delightfully and unmistakably warm. For this reason a sleeping apartment should never be furnished with a fire, which is one of the luxurious discomforts of the rich. For the height of this sort of deliciousness is to have nothing but the blanket between you and your snugness and the cold of the outer air. Then there you lie like the one warm spark in the heart of an arctic crystal. (Moby Dick, ch. 11)

Did you realize THAT was in Moby Dick? 
Since that time, I’ve read many books aloud to my adolescent and later fully grown kids. I’ve also had the chance to read books with friends and with students. Here are a few other memorable grown-up read aloud experiences I’ve had:

• The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood (With a good friend--the book doesn’t have to be a classic to offer opportunities for conversation.)
• Jane Eyre (With older kids, at a cabin by the beach on rainy summer afternoons. I can’t remember if that was before or after reading, separately, Jasper Fforde’s The Eyre Affair, which is clever and smart and funny, and greatly enhanced by familiarity with Jane Eyre.)
• The Rosie Project (With a visiting grown daughter in the lull after the celebrative whirlwind weekend of the younger daughter’s graduation and wedding. Reading, we laughed so hard we snorted and teared up, and it was just the perfect time for that. See this blog for my processing of some of the more serious emotions of the time.) 

Maybe you listen to audio book to a similar effect. If so, excellent. For myself, I don’t listen well, so I have always been our family’s prime read-aloud reader. One of my daughters was all fired up to read me a book she loved in elementary school—The Book of Three. I thought, “Great! Love the initiative, and we can do it while I cook!” As it turned out, I just can’t follow audio without at least the visual of words to focus me. I still don’t listen to podcasts—I’d rather read the transcript! Plus, I feel like it would be harder to stop and start an audio book than to just pause and comment.

Maybe you participate in a book club to a similar effect. That’s good. And in some books, there are just too many conversations to remember them all for one big discussion at the end. Reading together may be a way to cultivate an appreciation for a classic, or to share a book that is so crammed with humor or insight or beauty that the whole experience cries out for a companion.

These experiences have enriched my own experience of reading, my thinking, and my relationships with the people with whom I’ve read. They’ve also informed my teaching because I want students to be enriched by reading in the same ways. I value reading aloud with high school students, especially short stories (see this blog) and plays (see this blog).  

If you’re looking for a different reading experience—whether because you love to read or because you haven’t yet found just the book that will ignite your latent reader—or if you’re feeling left out of the read aloud craze because you don’t have any young children around or because you’ll go stark raving mad if you have to read The Very Hungry Caterpillar aloud one more time—consider trying a read aloud just for fun, as a shared experience, with an adult friend or older child.

I recently read aloud another book to my oldest daughter. It was Fredrik Backman’s latest (if you’ve read My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She’s Sorry, A Man Called Ove, or Beartown)—Things My Son Needs to Know about the World. Times have changed. I was reading on my Kindle from the free sample available on Amazon. My daughter was hemming curtains while her 2 children napped. But the experience of sharing reading was still the same.

Have you read aloud for fun with older children or adults? What book did you read and what did you learn from the experience? What book would you like to do this with? With whom?