Story Time is for Everyone
Reading aloud, even to other adults, yields surprising rewards
Not long ago, Linda Khan was sitting by a hospital bed, feeling ill at ease. Beside her lay her 88-yearold father. His heart was faltering. He needed surgery. What troubled her almost as much as his health was the fact that all day the two of them had engaged in nothing but depressing small talk. She and her father had always had good conversations, but now he seemed to be sunk in querulous contemplation of his predicament. He talked about the lousy hospital food, the tests, the doctors, the diagnosis. The scope of his once wide-ranging interests seemed to have shrunk to the size of the room.
That day in the hospital, her eyes fell on a stack of books that people had brought as gifts. Her father had always been a reader, but lately he didn’t have the energy or focus. She picked up Young Titan, Michael Shelden’s biography of Winston Churchill, and started to read it out loud.
That afternoon, Khan read to her father for an hour. It was a relief and a pleasure for both of them. Reading gave the daughter a way to connect with her father and help him in a situation that was otherwise out of her hands. Listening allowed the father to travel on the sound of his daughter’s voice, up and out of the depth of illness and back into the realm of mature, intellectual engagement, where he felt himself again.
Reading may be just what the doctor ordered. In a 2010 survey in the UK, elderly adults who joined weekly read-aloud groups reported better concentration, less agitation, and an improved ability to socialise. The survey authors attributed these improvements in large part to the “rich, varied, nonprescriptive diet of serious literature” that group members consumed, with fiction encouraging feelings of relaxation and calm, poetry fostering focused concentration, and narratives of all sorts giving rise to feelings and memories.
Almost any kind of reading to another person can be beneficial. That seems to be especially true for Alzheimer’s patients, according to a 2017 study of 800,000 men and women with dementia. “Reading a literary text together not only harnesses the power of reading as a cognitive process, it acts as a powerful socially coalescing presence,” the study’s authors wrote.
WE ARE NOT THE ONLY SPECIES to benefit from this kind of oral medicine. Dogs do, too, which is why volunteers at the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals read to the animals under their care.
“Ten or 15 years ago, I was essentially the only person who worked with the neglect and abuse cases,” says Victoria Wells, the organisation’s senior manager for behaviour and training. “I used to sit with them, in front of their kennels, and play guitar
and sing. I used to play the Beatles. I noticed that the dogs who were very fearful, in the back of their kennels shivering and cowering, would slowly creep forwards to the front. They would appear to be listening, and they would become very relaxed.”
The dogs’ response to music led in a natural way to the idea of reading aloud. Some volunteers keep the animals apprised of current events by reading the newspaper, some choose children’s books, and others prefer adult fiction. “The dogs really enjoy the reading,” Wells says. “The fact that it’s not threatening but it’s attention all the same is what’s most beneficial.”
READERS GET REWARDS, TOO. For Neil Bush, the late-life hospitalisations of his famous parents, former US President George H. W. and Barbara Bush, became opportunities to repay a debt of gratitude.
“When I was a kid, [my mother] would read to me and my siblings,” he told a reporter in 2018. With his parents in and out of care, he said, “we’ve been reading books about Dad’s foreign policy and, more recently, Mom’s memoir.”
Bush went on, his voice thick with emotion: “And to read the story of their amazing life together has been a remarkable blessing to me, personally, as their son.”
Reading to a spouse, sibling or parent might feel a little peculiar at first.
Initially, it felt odd and even improper to presume to read to a man who, for her entire life, had always been strong and independent, Linda Kahn told me. Her fear was misplaced; they both ended up loving the experience. Like so many others who brave the momentary weirdness of reading to another adult, they were, to borrow a phrase from Wordsworth, surprised by the joy of it.
Who wouldn’t want that? One night, years ago, a friend of mine picked up a copy of Michael Shaara’s novel The Killer Angels about the American Civil War.
Without thinking much about it, he started to read the preface out loud. Immediately, he was joined by his eldest son, who was about 12. A moment later, his wife came in, followed by the couple’s two daughters, who at six and eight were not perhaps the target audience but wanted to be part of a family moment. Within a few minutes, everyone seemed so comf y and engaged that my friend kept reading. He picked the book up again after dinner the next night, and the next, until he had finished it.