reading aloud + used books = reading used books aloud

I've been thinking a lot today about what's going on when someone reads aloud, and specifically when one reads aloud and other people are listening. It keeps coming up today. In one class, while going through some hypothetical lessons to be taught in correlation with Moises Kaufman and The Techtonic Theater Project's The Laramie Project, a few of my classmates read from the play's Moments. Now, the lesson activity they were reading for wasn't necessarily about giving voice to the words or anything like that. But it was pretty powerful, even as a side note to the objective of the lesson.

Then in another class, we learned that students with learning disabilities tend to comprehend a text more adequately when they hear it read by a fluent reader than when reading it silently themselves or when they "sound it out." So there's another qualification to the kind of "reading aloud" to which I'm devoting this blog space: Not only am I talking specifically about reading aloud to (a) listener/s, it's also gotta sound good. What does "sound good" mean though?

Later in the afternoon, I happened to catch the first twenty-five minutes or so of a poetry reading by Natasha Tretheway who won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for poetry. Now that woman can read aloud.

But I'm having trouble describing exactly what I think is happening when someone reads aloud to an audience, and does so well*, that I'm finding so exciting.

Whereas in the above paragraphs I was writing about reading aloud, in the rest of this entry I'm going to write about reading books that have been used by other readers**. I'm talking books that have been checked out of the library before I've checked them out specifically, but also books that are purchased "Used."

I'm currently in the middle of reading an essay from a book I got from the library. Actually, I'm reading a copy of the essay that I made today because I wanted to be able to take notes on the text, and it's impolite to write in library books. Except that someone already wrote in this one. And I'm having a lot of fun comparing what s/he underlined to what I think is striking enough to underline, seeing what s/he starred, etc. (The fascinating-ness of comparing our two sets of markings of what's important gets even deeper when considering the topic of the essay, which is a critical examination of evaluation and value; how do we decide that a text is valuable?)

I'm not sure what I make of this either. Other than thinking, "Coooool."



*well: a relative term meaning I'm not sure what
**This sentence is an example of something that writers call a transition***
***This clarification is an example of something writers call a footnote