aloud

My mother must have read to me when I was a child but I have no memory of it. There are books in our house, but not vast shelves of them. My father reads cheap trashy detective stories—James Hadley Chase—with fallen damsels draped across the dust jackets.

Growing up, I don’t remember my mother reading much for her own pleasure either. As the years pass and her interest in gardening grows, the library of books about plants and Australian plants blooms. In her later years Dickens, Trollope, and Eliot become great favourites, and the diarists—Pepys, Hunt, and Boswell. She has a magnificent collection of first editions.

These days she’s always reading something. We talk about books a lot, the characters in them, the ideas. I don’t share her passion for certain authors but I share her passion for reading. And I read aloud. Not to myself, but to others.

It’s 1979 and Marilyn is pregnant with our son. We rent short-term accommodation in Belair, overlooking the night lights of Adelaide. Our communal arrangement at Littlehampton has collapsed and we’re waiting to return to Victoria, but first there’s the matter of a birth. Our home birth midwife and doctor are all arranged in Adelaide.

During the last month and for the first month after the birth I read Lord of the Rings to her. Fourteen hundred pages is one thing, but voicing so many characters is a feat in itself. I read to her and to my son in utero. I read to him as an infant and toddler and then to his sister too.

I read to various lovers after the marriage ends, and then read Lord of the Rings, aloud, again, to my children and Carol’s children when we are a blended family. The girls give it away but the boys stick it out. These days as adults my son occasionally reads the trashy stuff my father still reads, my daughter reads literature.

I read still, anything, any time, anywhere. I cannot be without a book in my hand, in my bag, in my backpack. I take a book to the toilet. I take a book to the fish and chip shop, the dentist, and on the train, of course.

Now I read aloud to my good woman. She tells me tonight that she simply cannot believe the enjoyment she gets when I read to her. She cooks minestrone and I read. Her daughter tells me I should read aloud, talking books, for a living.

I love it, but I ain’t that good.   

 

Rock on.