In our
first year together, my wife and I started reading out loud to one another. It began as a joke. She had picked up a Jilly Cooper novel
somewhere – England’s equivalent of Danielle Steele – but she couldn’t make it
through the first chapter, deciding it was too trashy. One night, as we cleaned the kitchen, I began
reading it out loud. At first I
declaimed and emoted and goofed around and then . . . we got into the
story. We read the entire book. And then another one.
I think we
read three Coopers before we decided to elevate our tastes and try Jane
Austen. I was skeptical. I had “read” Pride and Prejudice in college and hadn’t liked it. This time, however, I loved it. It may have been because I was no longer
nineteen, but it also was because reading it out loud meant reading it
slowly. In college, it had been an
assignment, and we had done the book in less than two weeks. I whipped through it, concentrating only on plot
– they don’t like each other and then
they do. I was going too fast to
appreciate the irony, the wit, the style, in short, what makes Austen Austen.
We read all
of Jane Austen, and then moved on to Harry Potter, a series that was just
coming out. Each year, as Rowling
published a new volume, we would read it out loud. A chapter a night. We weren’t among those who finished a book as
soon as possible. That seemed crazy to
us. No, we savored it. And, sometimes to prepare for the release of
a new volume, we would read the last one again.
My son has
now reached the age where we think he can handle the series (which grows
progressively darker), and we’ve begun reading it out loud once again. The family gathers after dinner and listens
to my wife. (She is fantastic with
accents and reads wonderfully. If I even
make a gesture of reaching for the book, the children understandably complain.) For my son, it’s a revelation. Harry’s a wizard? Awesome!
For us, it’s also a revelation as we realize how tightly Rowling has
constructed this world. Hagrid brought
the baby to the Dursleys on a motorcycle he borrowed from Sirius Black, a
character who won’t show up for two volumes?
Awesome!
Part of the
pleasure stems from the story itself. Rowling’s
very popularity sometimes means she doesn’t get as much credit as she should
for her skill as a writer. Part of it is
seeing my son’s engagement and knowing he has the whole series in front of
him. And much of it is from a sense of
communion. Books are usually solo
experiences. We read them by
ourselves. Even when we read the same
ones, we have different experiences.
But, a book read out loud, that’s a shared experience. It’s a story, and more than a story; words
spoken out loud are a spell, binding us together.
