|
So, on the first dark and stormy night we had this year (this was a couple of days ago - longest, hottest summer we had in 60 years, but winter has finally arrived) my girlfriend and I decided to read Lovecraft together deep into the small hours.
It was a ton of fun - we alternated turns, and each of us would read aloud a short story to the other. For non native speakers, Lovecraft can prove to be quite the tongue twister, but we managed, and both had a great time. We decided to do that again.
That had me thinking. Iv'e never tried to read any sort of story (short or long) with anyone else before. Mostly it's a good thing because reading a book is a very personal experience and while it's fine to discuss the book later with someone, I'd actually prefer to be alone whilst reading it.
But every now and then I still think sharing the reading experience with someone could be a refreshing change of pace, especially for someone like me who spends quite a bit of my free time reading.
Did anyone ever try anything like this? are there other ways to read books together? while reading out loud to each other worked for (very) short pulp stories by lovecraft, I'm just not sure how well that will work for any sort of longer fiction that is less of a mood piece and more of an actual story. Even a 50 page long story could be too much to read out loud. Reading out is MUCH slower that just reading alone, and the fatigue of having to keep up a reasonable pace could be serious.
However, just two people sitting together, each reading the same book on their own wouldn't quite work either - for example, my girlfriend reads about twice as fast as I do, and I simply wouldn't be able to keep up.
Back when my wife and I had free time on our hands, we started reading to each other, and that wound up turning into MY reading to HER. Yes, it worked for longer fiction. I read her 9 of L. Frank Baum's "Oz" novels, the first 3 of John D. Fitzgerald's "The Great Brain" books (and part of the 4th), "The Princess Bride" by William Goldman, "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" by Mark Twain (and part of "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn"), and other stuff.
Later in life, of course, the kids left us too tired at night to manage anymore. We tried it a few more times lately, but it always just put us to sleep.