I think that being read to might be one of the best things ever.
We do it to our little children so that they can learn, and see, and touch, and point – and sit in our laps.
We start, hoping they will, early on, morph into professors and doctors. And we continue because there is no other place we would rather be.
The lights are turned down and it’s quiet. And then a story unfolds, told by the voice of one of your favorite people. As it does, your imagination opens and a new world becomes real.
Heck, even outside of the family experience, reading to another can be special.
I have kind memories of teachers reading to me as a fifth grader back in Saudi Arabia.
Of course, some loved children are not read too.
But my guess is that few unloved children ever have people reading to them.
Again: Children’s books forever.
In Proust and the Squid, Maryann Wolf notes that for many children the act of being read to—and therefore the book itself—is powerfully associated with being loved. And that association does not cease at this stage: as the
novelist Penelope Fitzgerald has commented, “Twice in yourlife you know you are approved of by everyone—when you learn to walk and when you learn to read.”
-Alan Jacobs, The Pleasures Of Reading In An Age Of Distraction