On Reading Aloud

I want to offer some more thoughts about the actual reading itself, how wonderful it is to dive in every day.

When I was doing the poems, by and large — because the poems were relatively short — I would read ahead, do a rehearsal. But with the novels, I tend to read sight unseen, hence all the mistakes and the glitches, the many failures to maintain my control over accents, and all the different mistakes I make.

But there is something wonderful and trusting about starting to learn and understand the rhythms — in George Eliot, or the rhythms in Dickens, or the rhythms in Tolstoy. Because sometimes you're reading phenomenally long sentences and you think you know rhetorically where you're headed, and then you go — oh no, I haven't got that right. You can sometimes make a tiny little adjustment on a syllable in the middle of a word. If I've had to do a U-turn, then I'll start again — unless I'm seven or eight minutes in, in which case I will probably just stay with my mistake and hope people will forgive me the imperfection. But there is that glory of just trusting, and swimming in the words, and swimming in the text.

The other thing that I find just phenomenally moving, really, is to think — as I'm looking at these marks, these black marks on a white page — here I am, situated in my study at the top of a house in West London. I am lucky. I sit at a big window and look across London roofs. There's a big sky, and I can see magpies and seagulls, and I see herons and helicopters. And there are big clouds — big clouds now as I speak, beautiful big cumulonimbus clouds, and some blue sky after what was a little April shower just a while ago.

And I think: I am somehow reaching back to another embodied person. George Eliot, sitting at her desk with her pen, writing her words. Dickens writing his words. Tolstoy. An embodied person. And out of that mind, this connection into my mind, through time and space, through this medium of the book.

We take these things for granted. But in a world of AI — which I spend quite a lot of time thinking and writing about — I find this embodied connection, this thought of connection with another human mind through this medium, profoundly important. And all the empathy that reading great novels brings: that what if, as you sit and listen, hear, imagine through the eyes of the goodies and the baddies and the heroes and the heroines and the comic grotesques — and in Dickens's case, goodness me, the landscapes, and that astonishing way in which he manipulates all matter to tell his stories. You're engaged with all of those things.

So there is a wonderful empathetic and cognitive exercise that this reading out loud has been, for all of these years. And doing it every day — being with some of the most beautiful prose that's ever been written — well, that is a gift. That has been a wonderful part of this journey. And I feel very lucky. I feel very lucky to have done it.