'The Art and Practice of Reading Aloud to Others'

A longtime reader in Philadelphia, a retired attorney, tells me that since the start of the COVID-19 lockdown he has been reading books aloud to his wife, most recently The Wife of Martin Guerre by Janet Lewis. His list of more than a dozen titles includes Moby-Dick (“our overall favorite”), Bleak House, Elizabeth Bowen’s stories, Death Comes for the Archbishop and Louis MacNeice’s Autumn Journal.

“I write,” he says, “seeking your observations on the art and practice of  reading aloud to others. I’m sure that both you and I treasure those dark, affectionate nights when we read aloud to our children at bedtime. Our son, the most passionate reader among our brood of three, most fondly recalls my rendition of King Solomon’s Mines by H. Rider Haggard.”

Some of my favorite memories involve reading aloud to my sons. When very young they loved Will Hillenbrand’s books – Down By the Station and Fiddle-I-Fee, especially, because they could be sung – and titles by David Shannon, Mark Teague and Chris Van Allsburg. I remember Halloween Motel, The Witch Casts a Spell and Shake Dem Halloween Bones. To my middle son I remember reading the hardcover reprint of a comic book I read as a kid – Magnus, Robot Fighter, by Russ Manning. All of Roald Dahl’s books for kids were favorites, The BFG in particular.

I’ve read a book aloud to an adult only once, more than twenty years ago. I’m a rare reader who has never cared for The Great Gatsby, though I’ve read it several times, starting in high school. My wife had never read Fitzgerald’s novel, so I would read a few pages to her each night in bed. She wasn’t impressed and my judgment remained the same.

The last book William Maxwell read before his death on July 31, 2000, three weeks short of his ninety-second birthday, was War and Peace. He had read roughly a third of the novel when his eyesight began to fail, and the novelist Annabel Davis-Goff read the remainder of Tolstoy’s novel to him aloud. She recounts the experience in an essay collected in A William Maxwell Portrait (2004):

“Reading War and Peace with Bill allowed me a rare and privileged view of how a great writer reads. I had, I suppose, known that anyone who writes above a certain level must read differently from most of us. Nabokov, in the introduction to his Lectures on Literature, asks what a reader needs in order to read a book properly. . . . His four correct answers: imagination, memory, a dictionary, and some artistic sense.”

I suggest reading Davis-Goff’s entire essay. It’s too sad and beautiful to paraphrase. As she writes: “There are sequences in War and Peace so affecting that one can hardly bear to read them. Petya’s death; Natasha sacrificing Prince Andrei as she falls in love with the worthless Kuragin; Nikolai Rostov losing a fortune playing faro with Dolohov. These scenes horrify me every time I think about them. To read them aloud to someone of Bill’s sensibility made it possible for me to appreciate their full power.”

 My reader asks for further titles he might read aloud to his wife. I would suggest So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell; Kim and a good selection of Kipling’s stories; stories by Tolstoy and Chekhov; Janet Lewis’ novel The Ghost of Monsieur Scarron; Nabokov’s The Defense; Daniel Fuchs’ Brooklyn novels; and one work of nonfiction: A.J. Liebling’s Between Meals.