It is not just a simple, cozy, nostalgic pastime that can be taken up or dropped without consequence. In this distracted age, we need to change our understanding of what reading aloud is, and what it can do. “In a culture that’s undergoing what’s been called ‘the big disconnect,’ many of us are grappling with the effects of screens and devices, machines that enhance our lives and at the same time make it harder to concentrate and to retain what we’ve seen and read, and alarmingly easy to be only half present even with the people we love most. “A miraculous alchemy takes place when one person reads to another, one that converts the ordinary stuff of life - a book, a voice, a place to sit, and a bit of time - into astonishing fuel for the heart, the mind, and the imagination.”Īnd in a paragraph that seems like it could have been written for this week, she continues: “The time we spend reading aloud is like no other time,” Meghan Cox Gurdon writes in her new book, The Enchanted Hour: The Miraculous Power of Reading Aloud in the Age of Distraction.
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