Over the past few years, I have seen a number of debates and research studies critically evaluating the different mediums in which people consume books in the twenty-first century: Reading on paper versus reading on screens (e.g., iPad or Kindle) versus listening to audiobooks. In the case of reading on screens, at least, everyone agrees that this still constitutes reading—albeit there is plenty of science now to explain why this kind of reading is inferior to reading on paper. But with audiobooks, some now will argue outright that listening to a book is not the same as reading it. Plenty of others will bring up research data to nuance the conversation and explain factors that can affect this sort of reading in a positive or negative direction. Still others insist just as vehemently that “to our brains, it doesn’t matter”—humans relate best to stories, so reading or listening is all the same.
My intent here is not to settle this debate to anyone’s satisfaction. Instead, I want to consider a rather interesting assumption that almost all the participants in these contentious conversations share. Put simply, the debates over whether audiobooks should count as reading or not reveal the default individualistic mentality that we, children of (post) modernity, apply to reading. In other words, whatever medium we use for ingesting books today, the overwhelming assumption is that we’re doing it alone.
This makes sense in light of our individualistic lives. We’re an increasingly isolated and lonely society. We’re bowling alone; we’re home alone for an increasingly greater portion of our lives; since the pandemic, we’re increasingly working alone (possibly from home, without other people); we’re getting takeout instead of eating out around other people; and we’re reading alone—that is, at least, those of us who haven’t fallen prey yet to the great literacy collapse. Reading alone might not seem so earth-shattering or problematic to you, but perhaps it should—specificly if that is the only kind of reading people ever do.
Put simply, history shows that reading at its best used to be much more communal than individual—because the function of the earliest literature was to bring people together rather than give them a delight to hoard all to themselves. The roots of literature in oral tradition show this most clearly. The Homeric epics were composed and performed orally by traveling bards before there was a Greek alphabet for writing them down. Performances brought communities together for the joy of such entertainment. These occasions also provided people with shared literature to discuss presumably for days after such performances. After all, when you are next to someone for hours as you enjoy an activity, won’t you logically turn to them at some point and strike up a conversation? Strangers could become friends over the communal enjoyment of works that eventually became, yes, the objects we today call books.
Good education for the entirety of the ancient world, furthermore, included the assumption of memorizing vast swathes of these epics and other great works, offering not only shared entertainment for communities, but creating shared values and offering shared language for certain occasions, including humor. A prankster in the first century AD could riff on the opening verse of Vergil’s Aeneid in a graffito on a wall in Pompeii, and everyone recognized the literary masterpiece to which the joke referred. And while those who could read street graffiti also obviously possessed the necessary skills to read literature on their own, the enjoyment of epics and other poetry was still most often a communal endeavor.
Today, by contrast, if you enjoy Homer or Vergil, chances are, you are reading the epics alone, at home. There is nothing wrong with such reading per se. I love re-reading them on my own both in the original languages and in translation. And yet, we’re missing something incredible in this mode of reading, and we don’t even know it. Reflecting how we experience dramatic plays when we read them alone can help us identify that missing element.
When we read drama today, be it Euripides or Aristophanes or Shakespeare, it’s not only that we miss the dramatic element of seeing these plays performed live on stage—with the delight of gestures and body language added to the words to make jokes truly funny and tragic moments all the more poignant. No less significant, we miss the opportunity to process complex emotions in community with fellow citizens. This is the process Aristotle called catharsis and considered a key function of the good that tragedy in particular can do for the democratic state. In other words, Aristotle’s vision prized the communal experience of literature for the good of the public, not individual digestion at home for the pleasure of one.
So where does this leave us? Of course, the vast majority of my own reading, as is the case for everyone else in modern America, is done individually, alone (although if a kid is using me for a trampoline while I’m reading, is this still reading alone?). It probably sounds hypocritical of me to criticize this kind of reading, but I am not exactly criticizing it. I am, rather, noting that it is incomplete.
But there still remains room for us to read books in community today, and this brings us back to the question of listening to books, but not in that individualistic listen-through-your-own-headphones-alone format. I mean, rather, read-alouds of the sort I do with my kids daily—those periods that happen sometimes right after breakfast or during lunch or in the late afternoon when people are restless for no discernible reasons, so we just grab whatever book we’re reading through at the moment, and the nine-year-old and I take turns reading aloud for our joy and that of the six-year-old, who is still learning to read.
But read-alouds are not just for younger kids. Research indicates that reading aloud to older kids is key for fostering a life-long love of reading. But it is much too narrow to reflect merely on the purely utilitarian goal of fostering literacy, good though it is for individuals. Rather, I am thinking again about the relational aspect of reading. Why do my kids love family read-alouds, like Astrid Lingren’s Karlsson novels that we’re enjoying right now? Yes, of course, they enjoy beautiful storytelling. More than that, though, they enjoy the time we spend together. Reading together with people we love makes a good book even better, more memorable, more enjoyable for much the same reason as a delicious meal consumed with those we love tastes even better. And so, I read aloud to my husband in the car on road trips; he reads aloud to me sometimes in the evenings.
I contend that it is family read-alouds and, furthermore, such public acts of reading as the reading of Scripture at church that still show us the oldest and most important function of reading written texts—to bring people together. And, of course, there is the good old-fashioned book club, which could involve reading the book apart, but then still coming together to process it. No one will stop you, you know, from selecting a good book, inviting friends to read it, and then gathering in your home to discuss it and even read aloud your favorite bits—preferably over good food. (And while you could take that extra step of cleaning up all the Legos and toy trains in your living room first, that is strictly optional.)
Doing all these things is possible and desirable. It is a theological fact repeatedly confirmed by modern science: We were not made to live alone. And we were not made to read (only) alone.
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