Reading aloud for grownups

Personally, I don’t feel comfortable reading out load. I can read fast inside my head but when I try to read something to someone, I sound like a second grader stumbling over words like "spasmodic" and "extrication." Plus, it's embarrassing that I don't know how to pronounce common words that I read all the time but never hear. I was laughed out of a room when I pronounced Geoff as "Jee-off." Shucks.

Vermont Girl - I'm with you on that, it's a big part of why I prefer to listen, although I did try reading to him once. I'm terribly boring as a reader. Big rushes of words, then huge lapses of silence as I read ahead. We also have a huge dictionary to circumvent bitter fights about pronounciation, which is good for banal and desultory, not so good for Geoff or Bohumil Hrabal.

SJSU does an annual Milton Marathon in the spring where they read Paradise Lost aloud without interruption. Students and faculty take turns at the mike. Everyone who wants to read or just listen is welcome, even if you only have a few minutes.

In Spain, there's a national Book Day sometime in April. Every year, a public reading of Cervantes' "Don Quijote" is done at a national arts center in Madrid. Anyone with a copy can take a turn at the microphone (the reading takes 24-48 hours, I don't remember), and well-known people (writers, politicians, academics, etc.) attend. I don't know how they choose the person who reads the immortal opening lines, but that's apparently the biggest honor. I never attended, unfortunately, but it's broadcast on radio and parts are also shown on television, so I've been able to follow along occasionally.

Once, for a friend who had a cross-country flight and was afraid of flying, I read aloud/recorded the first three books from the "Series of Unfortunate Events" for him to listen to on his flight.

I enjoy reading out loud, but hate it when I come to a word and realize that I've no damn idea how to pronounce it because I've never heard it spoken, only've read it.

My mother still calls and reads bedtime stories to me, over the phone, when I'm sick. Mothers are most excellent people.

My lover at the time was so jealous as no one had ever read to him (I later confirmed that with one of his family members), so I made him copies of the tapes, which he loved. Then he bribed me with expensive chocolates to read to him in the evenings (like he had to...but the chocolates were damn fine). Funny, the kids and the lover really got a kick out of the polar bear poem and the crocodile poem.

hey, guys, thanks for bringing these memories back... I'm going to be smiling all day now :)

I'm relieved to hear that we're not the only ones who do this. I also found that reading poems onto a tape and then listening to them back while walking the dog was a great help to me at exam time.

My sister and I read that aloud to each other, and we've roped her husband into it as well. I can't hear (or speak) that story without smiling.

(Daftly it ws mostly from 'A Supposedly Fun Thing Etc' which if ever there's a book not written for speaking out loud etc)

once i tried a part from 'molloy' where moran was preparing to leave and harassing his son; reading aloud seemed to deprive it of a lot of its humor.

Thought I'd bump this as there was something on Radio 4 a couple of weeks ago about reading aloud for adults.

Also to add my tuppenceworth. Read a few things aloud to a girlfriend a few years ago... as I recall it was the original French version of Le Petit Prince. She like hearing French spoken, I like speaking it... May have read a few other things too. Walter de la Mare's retelling of Molly Whuppie springs to mind (a book I was read as a child - the pictures are amazing too).

It's dawning on me that I don't think I've been read to since I was young though. Not in real life, and not for the sole purpose of reading something aloud to me (as opposed to, say, having things read out by someone else in my English class).

Thread revive? Tell me about your recent experiences of reading aloud, or being read to!

I like reading out loud when I'm all by myself, especially with certain dense philosophical stuff (which is often transcribed from lectures anyway, so it works particularly well!), double-especially if I do it with a funny accent. reading Agamben in my best Slavoj Zizek voice, or Habermas as a humorless British professor... I may have already mentioned this, but when I was reading some of Blanchot's fiction recently I found it sounded good in the voice of the "Wizard People, Dear Reader" guy.

in general, I find that reading aloud forces me to slow down and pay attention to the structure of the sentences (and, if I'm doing a silly accent, to the sounds of the words and the letters themselves), which doesn't always necessarily improve my understanding of what I'm reading (because sometimes it's too much fun and I get distracted), but can be made to do so when interspersed with periods of intense furrowed-brow silence.

oh, I also used to read Donald Barthelme stories to my ex-girlfriend sometimes, which would usually lead to her falling asleep (as people upthread have mentioned, this is a perennial risk) -- although that was sort of the point.

I have a particularly fond memory of a drunken night when a number of people retired to a friend's house after the clubs were closed to smoke w33d and chill, whereupon we found a children's book lying on a table and decided to have impromptu 'circle time', with a 'teacher' sitting in a chair reading + showing the pictures while the rest of us sat on the floor.

and I read all of Holderlin's "The Archipelago" out loud the other day, with much dramatic relish, although I had to take a break halfway through and get some water.

The idea of being read to sleep is something I find appealing - As a radio 4 listener since I was about 15 (and someone for whom reaching to turn off the radio at night was too much of an effort!) I find being lulled to sleep by someone else's voice... well, just nice. I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing to fall asleep while someone else is reading.

I find I only read aloud to myself if I find a particularly tricky or badly written sentence in order to make sense of it.
Slowing down the sense of it is pretty much what aids my understanding.

As someone who likes funny voices/accents/words, reading stuff out loud can be really fun, although I tend to do it with things people say or texts other than books (posters, menus and whathaveyou). Mexican bandito, Sean Connery and French accents all particular favourites.

Have quite often read aloud, usually to g/fs, most memorably: Frankenstein in some Vienna gardens, A Warning to the Curious (MR James) in bed in Aldeburgh (where it's set), Dymchurch Flit by Kipling (f'ing hard that one, tho quite rewarding if you can maintain the accent). Mason & Dixon in a tent in France (the cheese rolling episode - the next morning the people in the tent next to us said how much they'd enjoyed it, which was nice, but also could have been a coded 'and don't do it any more' of course). Treasure Island many times, remember reading it to my brothers when they were small and to other people's children as well.

Have always found it's worth reading what you're going to read through first, so there are no nasty surprises, false emphases or rhythms, and maybe to allocate accents (found this useful with TI, otherwise all pirates have the 'argh jim lad' accent).

Terrible, simply terrible at reading poetry, complete clodhopper, blundering into syllables and rhythms like a bull in a china shop.

Loved being read to as a small child (or just having stories made up out loud) and would go some way to crediting it for learning to read all sorts of things very young, as my mum or usually my dad would foolishly leave the book lying around at the end of a chapter, and once they'd left the room, I'd pick it up, no matter how difficult and pore through it, with the lamp jammed against the wall so it barely cast any light (hence glasses now, I'd rather imagine).

We've read so many books aloud since I started this thread. The Good Soldier, The French Lieutenant's Woman, Bleak House (I cried and cried), Dud Avocado and The Old Man and Me, The Great Gatsby, something by Peter deVries that was so funny, Don Quixote, Lucky Jim, A Meaningful Life (which started out so promising and had me hating the world and everyone it it at the end), half of Tom Jones (rollicking but so much of the same sameness at the midpoint - much like the Tale of Genji). We've taken a major break since about April though (after we finished A Meaningful Life, now that I think of it), but now it's cooler and the nights are drawing in we are going to start Olivia Manning's Fortunes of War.

I like this.

Great book for this:

http://www.amazon.com/Return-City-White-Donkeys-Poems/dp/0060750022/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1328735273&sr=8-1

Mr. Jaq and I were talking this morning about how the reading aloud has gone by the wayside - we stalled out in the middle of Olivia Manning's Balkan trilogy. We started listing all the books we had done and plotting what to start back up with. It's been a dozen years or more since we read Dance to the Music of Time.

I hate the sound of people reading aloud! I especially don't like it if it's something I've written and someone else reads it - can't stand it for some reason

when lxy and i drove around iceland we started'journey to the center of the earth.' and then we read some more of it on road trips since. i wish i liked to do this at home as much as when i'm driving and she reads to me.

As the nights draw in, it seems to be the right thing for us to turn to. Whereas in the car...well, let's just say I'm untrusting and hypervigilant and no way could I deal with it. I can barely listen to the radio while I'm driving (or being driven).

Thinking of that, dog latin how do you feel about going to plays or listening to the radio or tv news? Is it a completely different thing from being read to, for you? I can't bear listening to tv or radio news/talk shows. Though I think it's the subject matter vs. the being read to.

i loved the part in that stephen king family profile in the nyt sunday magazine about how he would make his kids record true crime books and horror books on tape! when they were kids! so cool. and completely inappropriate too which just made it funnier. having his young daughter read out loud and record a grisly book about the jonestown massacre onto tape. you gotta love the kingmeister.

i can't believe this thread is nine years old. hope you are well, Jaq! ten years of ILB in december.

Hi Scott! I'm well; hope you and Maria and your boys are doing great. Crazy isn't it, how long it's actually been. I started this thread 2 weeks after finding ILB via Bookslut. So glad it's still here.

Perhaps dog latin doesn't like being read aloud to because many people read aloud in a halting voice, or a toneless one, or simply read aloud in a somewhat awkward manner. Doing it well requires both a text that lends itself to a fluent reading and a reader capable of delivering correct intonations while sight-reading.

There is plenty of writing out there that is tortuous and clunky. I find it mostly in newspapers, in histories, in biographies, and in 'literary' fiction. Ironically, it shows up very frequently in modern poetry and I've taught myself to overlook a lack of fluency in poetry in order to enjoy its other qualities, but poems that can't be read aloud always seem to me to be a sin against poetry.