Reading aloud

This is a very old column, probably from fifteen years ago. My wife and I resurrected the reading-together habit during the COVID lockdown and continue it today. 

For the last few years, my wife and I have been reading aloud together.

This may seem an unusual twenty-first-century pastime, but it has an honorable pedigree. Before television sucked away society’s soul, books were a primary form of entertainment. What better way to experience them than around crackling fire (or, today, under an electric blanket), bringing a writer’s words to life via voice?

Our modern reading odyssey began with an author apt for Halloween: Stephen King. In the foreword to Part 1 of his 1996 serial novel, “The Green Mile,” King tells how he, his brother, and his mother would take turns reading stories aloud from The Saturday Evening Post.

“It was a rare chance to enjoy a written work as we enjoyed the movies we went to and the TV programs (Rawhide, Bonanza, Route 66) that we watched together; they were a family event,” he writes. He then urges readers to share “The Green Mile” as a read-aloud with a friend.

My wife and I took him up on that, reading each monthly installment and agonizing over the weeks between. When it was over, we were read-aloud addicts.

In the last ten years, we have plowed through dozens of books. Sometimes, our work schedules and outside commitments conflict, and we do not read together for weeks or even months.

However, when a book is compelling enough, we always make time, reading late into the night or early on weekend mornings (weekday mornings are always too hectic) until we reach the final page.

Most of our selections are novels, including many by King and suspense maestro Richard Matheson. For a while, when Matheson’s works had found renewed interest in Hollywood, we battled to stay ahead of the local cinema with “Stir of Echoes” and “What Dreams May Come.” (Both books are better.)

We read Dan Brown’s “The Da Vinci Code” but stalled on its precursor, “Angels and Demons” (too similar). We loved Mark Haddon’s “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time,” told from the point of view of a young man with Asperger’s Disorder, even though the singular way Haddon tells the story – with many pictures and diagrams – made it a challenge to read aloud.

Sometimes, a book fails to catch our attention, at least collectively. We started “Cold Mountain” together, but I finished solo. Holly slogged on to the end of Billie Letts’ “Where the Heart Is” after my interest flagged.

We have tried a few short story collections. Ray Bradbury is a proven winner, especially his early work, like “Small Assassin” and “The Jar,” both recommended for Halloween. Anthologies, by their nature, are more of a mixed bag, and we seldom read one straight through.

In non-fiction, we have read and enjoyed Nathaniel Philbrick’s “In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex,” an excellent account of an incident that may have inspired Herman Melville to write that whale of a novel, “Moby Dick.” We were three chapters into James Frey’s “A Million Little Pieces” when the author was publicly shamed for making large parts of it up, and we lost all interest.

Currently, we are enjoying a novel very appropriate for this spooky season, “Creepers” by David Morrell. It tells the story of a group of urban explorers – people who break into abandoned buildings to chronicle the history left behind – and what happens when they discover more than they bargained for in a singular New Jersey hotel.

Like all of Morrell’s books, the author researches his topic meticulously, dropping specific references to methods and tools of urban exploration to create verisimilitude, so that when the inevitable weirdness begins, readers accept it without hesitation.

And, in an odd case of coincidence or synchronicity, one of the writers to whom Morrell dedicates his book is Matheson, another of our read-aloud regulars, whose “Hell House” bears certain thematic similarities. Morrell was also inspired to become a writer after watching “Route 66,” one of the shows King mentions in the “The Green Mile” foreword that started my wife and me on our read-aloud journey.

Those tempted to hum the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s “Will the Circle Be Unbroken” have my permission.

And anybody curious about the read-aloud experience should start with “Creepers” or one of the other titles given thumbs up here. The process is low tech, requires little or no electricity, and beats most anything on TV these days.

A crackling fire is optional but recommended.