ST201904

THINK (^) | WELLBEING
TE LL ME A STORY
PUT AWAY YOUR GADGETS, CHOOSE A GOOD
PAPERBACK AND REDISCOVER THE SIMPLE,
MOOD-BOOSTING PLEASURES OF READING ALOUD
Words: JESSICA JOHNSON
O
ur teacher was reading us Robert
West a ll’s Ya xle y ’s Cat. I can still
hear Mrs O’s voice and feel the
dark winter afternoon ebbing in
through giant windows. There
we sat, a class of eleven year olds,
as a new, spooky story unfurled around us.
Ask us for our earliest memories of being read
to and most of us, unsurprisingly, track back to
childhood. Nowadays, we know that reading to
children is up there with fresh air and play as one
of the simplest things we can do to help kindle
growth, connection and confidence (and when
you’re curled up on the sofa channelling your best
squeaks and grunts for The Gruffalo, it’s hard to
be anywhere else but present). So why, when we
reach adulthood, do we have to close the book on
such a simple, shared joy?
THE AGE OF ELOCUTION
Historically, words were written for the purpose of
being read aloud. Today’s obsession with solitary
reading only really took hold toward the end of the
18th century when “some books were cheap enough,
and literacy widespread enough, that for the first
time many people could read on their own, silently,”
writes Abigail Williams in The Social Life of Books
(Yale University Press). “But at the same time there
was a near obsession with learning to read out loud:
this was the great age of elocution.”
It’s time for us to find our voices again, believes
Francesco Dimitri. In his book To Read Aloud (Head
of Zeus), Francesco makes a gentle plea for a return
to the ancient art of storytelling as a toolkit for
modern-day wellbeing. Packed with stirring
passages of prose and poetry from wordsmiths such
PHOTOGRAPHY: PLAIN PICTURE; SHUTTERSTOCK as Neil Gaiman, Charles Dickens and Virginia »
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