Manguel, Alberto. A History of Reading. Viking, 1996.
For most of us, reading is an act of pleasure—entertainment, an absorbing quest for knowledge. A good book can provide a break from our humdrum routine or from difficult emotional or physical demands. According to Alberto Manguel, reading is not an entirely innocuous activity.
A hundred and fifty years ago, in spite of the fact that many Victorian novelists were women, reading was considered to be too strenuous for young girls and ladies and too morally perilous for their fragile souls. My childhood, though not stretching back that far, was riddled with censure for always having my nose in a book.
A History of Reading is an engrossing study full of poetry as well as scholarship and offers many surprising revelations. It seems that until about the tenth century people didn’t usually read silently to themselves, they read out loud, whether or not there was anyone else around. Manguel speculates that researchers in the great ancient libraries “must have worked in the midst of a rumbling din.” Over the centuries, reading out loud has been a monastic discipline as well as a crime against the state. St. Benedict of Nursia, in setting forth the Benedictine Rule in the sixth century, decreed that reading would be part of a monastery’s daily life. He charged one monk to read aloud something edifying at mealtimes while the others kept silence. Fast-forward to mid-nineteenth century Cuban cigar factories where reading out loud became a subversive activity. The illiterate workers paid lectores to read to them during their long, boring workday. Alexander Dumas’s novel The Count of Monte Cristo was popular, and so were local and foreign newspapers. The latter, which contained “exposés of the tyranny of factory owners” and contributed to the rise of labor unions, were deemed treasonable, and in 1866 the Political Governor of Cuba forbade managers of cigar factories to allow public readings on their premises.
In twenty-first-century America we think reading out loud is anything but revolutionary. Many of us remember happy hours snuggled close to Mommy or Daddy with a tattered copy of The Adventures of Uncle Wiggly. At some point, though, we were told that we were too old to be read to, the accepted cultural wisdom being that reading is a private and personal activity and, once you know how to do it, it is weakness to have someone do it for you.
How I would love to be read to more often, and not just if I am too busy to open a book on my own. Pressing the “play” button for an audio book does not accomplish the same thing. Read to me even in Czech or Esperanto or Cree and I will be lulled into a pleasant alpha state. I will not have accumulated more facts and may have learned nothing more than the sounds of Czech or Esperanto or Cree. I will, however, have been comforted by the human voice without feeling any need to nod, dispute, or change the subject.
We consider it natural to read to preschoolers. What if we read to everybody?