On my honeymoon, my husband and I began reading J. R. R. Tolkien’s “The Fellowship of the Ring” aloud to each other as we drove. Some may deem that a nerdy way of spending one’s newlywed days, but we enjoyed it, and our enjoyment led us to read through the entire “Lord of the Rings” trilogy within a few months. We then progressed to C. S. Lewis’ “Chronicles of Narnia,” and we’ve read various novels and parenting books together since. In the last year, we’re slowly working through Virgil’s “Aeneid.” 

Because of my background in literature, reading aloud is not a novel idea to me (no pun intended!). In a college Shakespeare class, a few of my classmates and I regularly got together to read the play we were studying. I also participated in a read-aloud discussion group that focused on Wendell Berry’s essays.

These experiences made me realize that reading aloud with others is not just beneficial for children in a school or family setting; it is also useful for adults. Why? Because reading aloud with even one person enables a unique understanding of what is read and creates a community that you just don’t get when reading alone.

Let’s consider comprehension first. Reading Shakespeare’s plays or poems aloud – or any poems, for that matter – helps me understand and appreciate their meaning more easily due to their reliance on sonority. The popularity of audiobooks, especially for denser works, underscores this increase in understanding. I credit audiobooks with helping me through several long classics such as George Eliot’s “Middlemarch” and Charles Dickens’ “Bleak House.”

For children, reading aloud strengthens vocabulary, improves comprehension, furthers cognitive growth, and deepens imaginative ability – all noble things!

But as I mentioned above, even more significant than all these benefits is the relational bond that grows through reading aloud. Regularly reading to one’s children supports the parent-child bond. I have seen firsthand that doing so in the classroom can also facilitate relationships between teacher and students.

There is a unity cultivated by several people attending to the same words read by another person. Together, the reader and the listeners come into the presence of the story being told. Together, the reader and the listeners relish the language of the story in real time, and they can likewise approach the meaning of the work together.

Such unity is one of Wendell Berry’s concerns in his essays and stories. In “The Work of Local Culture,” he writes:

By television and other public means, we are encouraged to imagine that we are far advanced beyond sitting till bedtime with the neighbors on a Kentucky ridgetop, and indeed beyond anything we ever were before. But if, for example, there should occur a forty-eight hour power failure, we would find ourselves in much more backward circumstances than our ancestors. What, for starters, would we do for entertainment? Tell each other stories? But most of us no longer talk with each other, much less tell each other stories. We tell our stories now mostly to doctors or lawyers or psychiatrists or insurance adjusters or the police, not to our neighbors for their (and our) entertainment. The stories that now entertain us are made up for us in New York or Los Angeles or other centers of such commerce.

Granted, Berry has more than reading in view here, as he dwells on modernity’s “progress” beyond true local culture. But his ideas also apply to reading aloud, as he points out that we no longer sit together merely to tell our own stories or listen to each other’s. We feel we have advanced beyond such archaic entertainments. Yet in our so-called advancement we have also lost the fellowship and familiarity that would even allow us to simply sit together to talk or read.

Communal readings will not likely see a heyday in our larger culture. But if communal reading sees even a revival in small pockets of our local communities, I imagine that eventually our larger culture will be blessed, if only for the opportunity  to sit together with neighbors or friends.

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This article was made possible by The Fred & Rheta Skelton Center for Cultural Renewal. 

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