Ryan Collerd for the NYT
A Father-Daughter Bond, Page by Page
One evening last week, a man walked up to my desk. He was a hard-looking dude and caught me by surprise; he wanted a particular book that we didn't have in stock. I offered to order it, free of charge, even suggested something similar. No thanks, he shook his head, I need something specific, something that my son already has. Um, Okay. He sighed, pulled out his phone, and dialed. A small voice on the other line. We tried a few others and eventually settled on something we had in stock. As I walked away he sat down in a chair and ever so quietly began to read, Chapter 1. All was still in the valley of the dragons...
Once I realized what was happening, I got a little teary. Okay, I was dumbfounded. I don't have children yet, but that moment had the effect of making me think tomorrow would be a good time to start. I'm not sure how long he sat there in our tiny chairs, reading to his little boy on the phone. An hour? Maybe two? I fought every impulse to run up and beg him to tell me how far away his son was, how old he was, how long had they been doing this, were they frequently apart? But I kept my mouth shut. It wasn't my place. So I worked just a little more quietly than I normally would, straining to listen above the sounds of the bookstore in motion.
He was the first person I thought of when I read the above New York Times article about a father and a daughter and 3,218 nights of consecutive reading. Their story strikes me as particularly important, aside from gushy sentiment. I wonder if reading together is about more than just 'a shared language.' We tend to think of shared experiences in terms of action. We go camping. We dance. We travel. We sky-dive and bungee jump if we are insane. But what about reading?
One of my roommates in college loved to tell the story of a husband and wife she met and stayed with while studying in the UK. Missing home, she offered to make them an authentic Mexican dinner and they happily agreed. While cooking, she was surprised when they pulled out a volume of ' A Tale of Two Cities,' found their place somewhere in the middle and began to read. Eventually they explained that they had been reading aloud to each other for their entire marriage. He read while she cooked, and she read while he did the washing up. They tried other authors, but nothing seemed to work as well as Dickens. They'd been through the entire canon dozens of times.
I got a bee in my bonnet after hearing that story, and talked my husband into something similar shortly after we were married. We took turns reading, each night before bed or on long car trips. We also tried a few different authors, but found out pretty quickly that Hemingway worked best, as well as most children's books. (Wizards and drunks. Who knew?) We read the final Harry Potter book on an 11 hour road-trip, using the lights from our cell phones to illuminate a single sentence at a time after the sun went down. Eventually we fell out of the habit, but I can't help but think that those stories were as integral to our lives in those early days as the places we went, people we met, or how broke we were.
This all makes me curious. It's pretty much a given that reading to young children is necessary to their mental development. But what about reading to older children, or even teenagers. What about another adult? Has reading out loud shaped any of your relationships? Does it qualify as a shared experience, like riding a bike or bad karaoke? And what's up with Dickens and Hemingway? Why do they work? Any insight would be much appreciated, friends
