The house is quiet, the kind of quiet that makes listening easy, when you can hear the softest sounds: a page turning, a little sniff, the sound of someone shifting position In a chair. That’s the way reading
time sounds in our house.

There are often little breaks in this quiet, groans of dismay or disgust at who-knows-what predicament, chuckles or outbursts of laughter at the (presumably) hilarious places. I’m barely aware,
though, as I’m engrossed in my own book. This delightful change of pace from the normal clamor of a busy family is a restful and refreshing oasis of time.

It is not family “read-aloud” time, however, but a gathering time, when everyone brings a book of their choice to meet in our living room. Last night, it was Dad in his leather chair, feet propped on the
footstool reading A Morbid Taste for Bones that someone had just urged him to read. My 11-year-old was sprawled (his default position) over most of the sofa with Phantom of the Blockade. His 16-year-old brother was at the far end of it, feet horning in on Dad’s footstool with Newton’s Principia, a tome he was inspired to tackle on the recommendation of Mr. Bowditch, one of his childhood heroes. Meanwhile, I sat in my grandmother’s rocker, miles and years away in the debtor’s prison of Victorian London with Little Dorrit.

Sound idyllic? It is. We are together, yet separate; pursuing a common goal, yet doing so independently. In the past, this kind of time was a happy accident that occurred once in a blue moon. I was encouraged to make it a more deliberate pastime when I read in Jim Trelease’s The Read Aloud Handbook, that the only single common factor that was proved to be effective in causing children to become readers was when a 15-minutes-a-day reading time was required in the classroom; the essential factor was that the reading selections had to be the child’s individual choice. Why not institute this at home, I thought. My youngest children certainly needed encouragement to read outside of school.

Our goal is to accomplish this at least twice a week, once on a weekend evening, once during a week night. The time is limited to 30 minutes. Despite our best efforts, other commitments do interfere, but
attempting and succeeding most, or even half, the time is better than not attempting or having this pleasure at all. It has been a relatively new practice in our home, bedtime read-aloud time having
been a habit with our children ever since we became parents.