Reading Aloud

We think of reading aloud as something done to children, a thing we grow out of. We are wrong to. Reading aloud to another adult is one of the most intimate and underused pleasures available to two people who love books and each other.

It is the oldest form of sharing a story — older than private reading, which is a relatively recent habit. For most of human history, books were read aloud, in company, one voice carrying the words to many ears. The silent solitary reader is the historical anomaly. To read aloud to someone is to return to the original way of it, and there is something deeply satisfying in that return, a rightness the body seems to remember.

The intimacy is in the voice. To read to someone is to give them your voice for an hour, to let them lie back and receive the story through you, the words filtered and colored by the way you say them. And to be read to is a rare and tender form of attention — to be the sole audience for someone’s voice, to follow a story without the work of reading it, to drift toward sleep as the words continue. There is a reason it soothes children. It soothes everyone. The receiving end of a read-aloud is one of the safest places there is.

Choose the right material. Not everything reads well aloud; dense or interior prose can lose its way spoken. But the right book — a vivid story, a funny one, a beautifully written passage, a poem — comes alive in the mouth in ways it never does on the silent page. You hear the rhythm the author built into the sentences, the music that silent reading skims right over. Reading aloud is also the surest test of good prose: bad writing trips the tongue, while good writing wants to be spoken.

Try it tonight. Pick a book, find a comfortable place, and read a chapter to someone — or take turns, a chapter each, passing the story back and forth. It costs nothing and asks only for a voice and an ear. And it gives back something the silent solitary reading of a thousand books never will: a story shared in real time, one voice to one listener, in the oldest and warmest way there is.