Steve West: reading aloud

NICK EICHER, HOST: Today is Tuesday, February 28th. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Nick Eicher.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard. Reading to children is one of the joys of life. WORLD commentator Steve West shared this audio of his wife and son reading together nearly 30 years ago:

WIFE AND SON: God sent a very big fish up out of the water to save Jonah from drowning. That fish looks very nice! He does. He looks like he’s smiling.

EICHER: Maybe reading aloud to your kids or grandkids is something you haven’t done in a while. And if you haven’t, I have a suspicion you may find some motivation here.

STEVE WEST, COMMENTATOR: When my daughter was 16, I started reading to her at bedtime. It's not as if I never read to her before, but somewhere along the line she decided she didn't want to be read to but would read to herself. Well, that fits. She never needed as much care and maintenance as her older brother. Every child is different.

I was challenged to begin reading to her again by a 2011 book titled The Reading Promise. The author, Alice Ozma, now married with a daughter of her own, writes of the promise she and her father made to each other: that he would read to her for 100 nights straight. Alice’s mother left the home when she was 9, and Jim Brozina began reading to his daughter to give her something permanent to count on: his time and attention.

So having read to Alice for 100 nights, they vowed to reach 1000 nights. Yet they ended up reading to each other for 3218 nights—nine years—for at least ten minutes a night, often longer–no matter what. It was a reading streak—one that didn’t end until Alice went to college.

I made no such promise to my daughter, just an indefinite and open-ended commitment. She went off to college about two years after that, too-short a period of time to rival Alice’s dad.

For my son, being read aloud to was a regular nighttime ritual. When he was an infant, I laid him on the floor beside me and read aloud whatever I happened to be reading, moving seamlessly from the Bible and catechism to James Michener’s fiction and Emily Dickinson’s poetry. It wasn’t about comprehension but sound, not about words and meaning but about cadence and rhyme and who was reading to him.

After he began to better understand the words, we graduated from Goodnight Moon and The Jesus Storybook Bible to longer books. I read the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy to him when he was six, 30 minutes at a time, sometimes more, my throat often dry and raspy near the end. That’s over 576,000 words. Sometimes, I confess, my voice trailed off as I fell asleep, sputtering nonsense, only to be stirred by an insistent voice scolding, “That’s not right, Daddy. Wake up.” He had an annoying habit of reading another book while I was reading to him, and so to test him, I would deliberately misread the story. He’d always call me on that.

Those days are long over, and yet I’m buoyed by the hope that those times of reading aloud are remembered, that my children will smile as they consider all those nights of words, and their dad—not primarily because we read a book, or because of what we read, but because for a short time we had each other.

It’s not really about books after all. It’s about forging a relationship, about a child and a parent. “Reading to someone is an act of love,” writes Alice.

Alice’s father adds, “No one will ever say, no matter how good a parent he or she was, “I think I spent too much time with my children when they were young.’”

March is National Reading Month. Maybe it’s time for a reading streak. Find a child or grandchild, and get busy.

I’m Steve West.

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