In Praise of Reading Aloud

After reading Aflame by Pico Iyer twice within the last month or so, I am reading it yet again. This time, I’m reading it aloud at breakfast with Mick. 

We have a history with reading books aloud at breakfast. We started during the pandemic when we read Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind by Shunryu Suzuki together.  We had decided to deepen our meditation practice and there was no better time than when we were stuck at home for an unknown and frightening duration. Then we read Not Always So, also by Shunryu Suzuki. We re-read both books, trying our best to understand Zen Buddhist ideas and metaphors. We tried Norman Fischer’s work to see how a different Zen teacher talked about the same practice. I loved talking about these ideas early in the day, letting our conversations percolate in my head over the next several hours. The way we experienced the world changed a little bit and sitting zazen helped us navigate the pandemic. Our Zen practice, though spotty, has stayed with us.

Mick and I moved on to reading Margaret Renkl’s books, starting with The Comfort of Crows and then moving backwards to Late Migrations. Her work, so grounded in the natural world, struck deep chords for both of us. The books resonated because of our gardening and hiking habits, because of our efforts to go against the ideas we grew up with about having a lawn and bending our natural surroundings to human will. Renkl pondered what climate change did to plants and animals, how that spilled over into people’s lives. And, again, the conversations reading these works aloud sparked have stayed with me, allowed me to absorb the ideas in the books in a very different way than reading in silence by myself ever would. 

Reading as a communal experience is a gift. Our choices have all been nonfiction books so far, on topics that matter a great deal to us and with sections that are short enough to complete during our breakfast reading time. We don’t move through the books quickly; we limit how much we read each day to just a few pages. That means it takes weeks to get through one book, but that one book gets profound attention. The reading aloud piece makes it a much more intimate affair than when each of us read the books on our own and talk about them later.

Aflame is sure to elicit many deeper conversations in the weeks to come. A small flame of insight can burn for a lifetime.