Remember how delightful and comforting it was to have your Mom or Dad read a story to you out loud? Especially so at bedtime, when you may not have been quite ready to give up having fun that day and settle down to sleep. Read-alouds probably spring from the practice of parents (or grandparents) reading aloud to their families before so many other entertainments were widely available.

As capable reading adults, you can recapture some of those positive feelings by reading aloud with spouses, lovers, and close friends. A friend and I took up the practice and found it comforting during the long, lonely pandemic. We started to read aloud to each other then.

We set ourselves the challenge of reading Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” since neither of us had ever read this classic Russian text. Our modest goal was to each read out loud a few pages at a time two or three times a week. Listening to the vocal portrayals we gave seemed to offer us some much-needed solace and low-key entertainment. We didn’t give ourselves a strict final deadline but instead slowly savored the book.

We also stopped in our reading sometimes to look up a word or find a location on a Russian map of the period. Often, we laughed about elaborate Russian names that were somewhat unpronounceable for us. We talked as the months passed about the well-described characters and how absorbing the plots and subplots were. We even learned some basic Russian history.

Not once were we bored with our reading: we enjoyed every session. To have so fully captured our attention for a full year and a half is a lot to ask—even of a world-renowned masterpiece!

We’re continuing to enjoy read-alouds. You may want to try them, too.