When I met my eventually-to-be-husband, I found that he was chronically under-educated, and hadn’t read most of my favourite books. So, shortly after we started dating, I began to read to him.
I read Deerskin, by Robin McKinley, first- my handle is after the heroine, Lissla Lissar. And then The Blue Sword, also by McKinley. To follow I read Beauty by Sheri S. Tepper.
We progressed onto the first Anne book, because of course being a boy he’d never read them. We paused after Anne Of Avonlea to read The Lantern Bearers, by Rosemary Sutcliff- a truly excellent book, and we’re going to read more of her things.
I know I was reading Anne Of The Island to him on our honeymoon, because I remember both of us collapsing in sobs when Ruby Gillis died.
I’ve started Rilla Of Ingleside, and expect to read most of it this week- it’s too tense a book not to read at fifty-page gulps.
He’s reading me Paradise Lost, and I’m going to get him to read me the Silmarrillion when we’re done. I’ve read it, but I want his voice telling me about the creation and fall of Middle-Earth. It will be even better heard than read.
I wondered how many others read aloud to their spouses, significant others or whatever? My best friend and her husband read aloud to each other, but they’re the only ones that we know who do. Is it common? And if you do read aloud, what have you read together?
He doesn’t really enjoy it. I’ll read blurbs aloud to him - things from the internet or newspaper or passages of a book I’m reading that are interesting or make me laugh - but we’ve never sat down to read an entire book.
Many have been the hours that kaylasmom and I have lain in bed together, I reading bestsellers from Danielle Steele to Wayne Dyer, The Hobbit to Harry Potter.
When we can obtain a Braille edition of a book, we sometimes take turns with it, taking turns reading chapters of, for instance, Charlotte’s Web, Bambi, or Sons and Lovers.
Now that we’re parents of a reading child, we sometimes have Michaela join us.
Not with D.H. Lawrence, of course. She’s only seven, for pity’s sake!
Funny you should mention D. H. Lawrence, because we started out with “Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” and then went straight into “Women in Love.” We read erotica (sometimes porn) to each other regularly.
Years ago, my wife had back surgery and was largely confined to bed for a lengthy period. During her recovery, I read her a book I knew she would enjoy, in blocks of an hour (or two) over about a week and a half.
The book was Stephen King’s Eyes of the Dragon. I didn’t tell her what it was before I started, because I knew she wasn’t a King fan. I’m not either, at least any more, but I have a soft spot for that book, and I was entirely confident that she’d enjoy it once she got hooked in the story and could disregard the author. I was right; she loved it.
My boyfriend and I have spent the last year and half reading George RR Martin’s “A Song of Ice and Fire” series aloud to each other. We actually started with the second book (since we’d both read the first) on the road trip to move me to Denver (I read to him since he did all the driving) and continued on to the third book. Now we’re reading the first one aloud while we wait for A Feast For Crows.
Well, he does more of the reading than I do, because his voice lasts longer.
We’ve both really enjoyed sharing the books together and predicting things to come and making connections that we wouldn’t necessarily have noticed had we read them seperately and to ourselves.
My husband and I do this. We read all the Harry Potter books like that, Memoirs of a Geisha, a bunch of Bill Bryson’s stuff, etc.
My husband likes it because if he just lies in bed and reads, he tends to zonk out after about a paragraph. If he’s listening to me or reading himself, he can stay awake longer. I like the being read to part…I can just kick back, close my eyes, and listen. I like hearing his voice, too. Plus, it’s fun to talk about a book with someone who’s reading it simultaneously.
We don’t do it a lot, but we have on occasion. In particular, on our first extended trip to visit my family in Arkansas, she read aloud to me from Donald Harington’s Let Us Build Us a City: Eleven Lost Towns, which worked out well since we ended up driving near or through many of the locations in the book. I’d already read it a couple of times myself, so I was familiar enough with it to be able to pay a lot or a little attention, as driving circumstances demanded (I can’t read in a car without getting carsick, so I drove, she read). It was also a good choice in that it’s a love story (among other things), and a true one at that (after a fashion – Harington lightly fictionalizes the protagonist, Kim, and himself, but not even so far as changing their names).
Many years ago, after we were married and while she was pregnant with our first child, I read to her in the evenings from Lawrence Ritter’s classic The Glory of Their Times: The Story of Baseball Told by the Men Who Played It, an oral history based on interviews Ritter did in the early 1960s with great baseball players from the first couple of decades of the 1900s. I don’t recall how we decided to do that (she could hardly have been called a baseball fan, particularly at that time), but it worked well – the ballplayers themselves are often fascinating characters, quite apart from their baseball experiences, and it was based on transcriptions of the players themselves talking about their lives, so it worked well to read aloud.
With three small children about these days, however, most of our reading aloud is to one of them (except for the occasional newspaper or magazine article).
We tend to go on a lot of driving trips so when he suggested that I start reading to him, I thought it was a great idea. He also HATED reading but got jealous when I rave about books I’ve read or refer to ones he hasn’t.
So far I’ve read Bill Bryson, Roald Dahl and the Harry Potter books. In fact, he has become a huge Potter fan now and is more excited about the series than I am!
Right now we don’t have any books on the go. I’ve been wanting to read him the LotR trilogy but mine are in storage. I think I’ll nag him to suggest something soon because it really makes the time fly on our trips.
We sometimes read to each other, but usually not an entire book. On road trips, I’ll read whatever Mr. moonstarssun is working on, picking up where he left off. I also did that when he scratched his cornea.
We do sometimes read short stories to each other in bed.
He hates to read but loves being read to. I had a hard time understanding this for the longest while. After a lengthy discussion I found he doesn’t like to read because to him, the words are just words. But when being read to - the words take on meaning and he can visualize what is going on. Strange, because my daughters and I always “see” movies" in our heads when reading. Our son, however, is just like his dad,and also dislikes reading.
Besides having to read aloud all the instuction manuals on his woodworking tools, I have read him ;
all the Harry Potter Books
the entire “Outlander” series (twice!)
“Odd Thomas”
various Stephen King shorts
and we have started on “The Time Travelers Wife” and the “Ice and Fire” series, both of which I absolutely loved. I may also have to read him “The Book of Flying”. It pulled me in at the first paragraph. The writing is just beautiful.
In return, he lets me read the Sunday paper over his shoulder.
I don’t really enjoy being read to. I do read to my wife occasionally, and I enjoy it, but it works best if I’ve read the book before.
The two reasons are related: I can read so much faster when I’m reading to myself that I find it frustrating to slow down and concentrate on stuff read out loud. When I’m being read to, I tune out. When I’m reading something out loud that I haven’t read before, I end up cheating and reading it anyway. (The Harry Potter books are a case in point.)
For much the same reason, I’ve never gotten into books on tape, although I’m a big fan of spoken-word radio shows like All Things Considered and This American Life. Conversational speed feels more appropriate for conversational shows than for novels.
Four years ago, I bought the first Harry Potter book, just to see what all the fuss was about. Due to timing, we were taking a long road trip the following day, and my wife asked me to read it to her while she drove.
She got hooked. However, she refuses to read them herself. We wound up going out and buying the whole series, whereupon she insisted that I read them to her. It took a while, too.
Since then, we’ve branched out a bit; due to the lack of Harry Potter availability, we sometimes do Terry Pratchett.
When Mrs. HeyHomie and I were in college and dating, she tried to read The Stinky Cheese Man to me. I collapsed in fits of laughter at her facial gesticulations.
Then, a few years later, she tried to read Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone to me. She got as far as “Mr. and Mrs. Vernon Dursley of Number Four, Privet Driver were perfectly normal, thank you very much…” until I collapsed in fits of laughter at her horrible British accent.
We’ve finished Rilla Of Ingleside and started Spindle’s End, by Robin McKinley. I’m a McKinley fanatic. It was a toss-up between it and Till We Have Faces by C. S. Lewis.
Mr. Lissar used to read Winnie-The-Pooh to me, too, and do all the voices. I must see if I can get him to do it today…
About a year ago I was extremely ill and hardly had the energy to even get out of bed. My SO knows I love to read and I get very involved in books. He enjoys reading but doesn’t have the patience for it. He can’t sit still for very long at a time. It was his idea to read a book together. It was a great surprise to me and one I loved dearly.
We took turns reading A Cry in the Night and The Cradle Will Fall by Mary Higgins Clark.
It’s one of my favorite memories. I was so excited when he suggested it, imagining all the books I would introduce him to. Unfortunately, we haven’t done read to each other since then.
I love reading, but don’t like being read to. I become so frustrated at trying to follow the story when the pacing and emphasis is different than what I would “hear” while reading to myself. I end up just zoning out and not enjoying it at all. Same with people that insist on reading slides during a powerpoint presentation - zone out city. I don’t even like having a newspaper article read to me.
