Toronto Star (Jan. 27, 2024)

Like many things in life, I began reading aloud to my wife, Denise Roig, out of necessity: she had a knitting project due plus a novel to read for book club. She’d have to blow one deadline.

The project was a scarf for a grandchild. The book was Kazuo Ishiguro’s “Klara and the Sun” and I read it aloud to her while she knit and had her morning tea in the hour or so before our daughter woke and the day began.

And so began a daily ritual we’ve come to enjoy and need.

To be honest, I do most of the reading. Because Denise’s knitting projects never seem to end: scarves, shawls, hats, loopy things. They’re as endless as the books on our to-read list.

To be even more honest? We’ve read aloud to each other almost since we met. Sentences that stand out in books that we were reading separately and that cried out “read me out loud!” Articles in magazines or newspapers. Talk of the Town items in the New Yorker, opinion pieces in the Times and the Star. Plus our own work, whether in-progress short stories or excerpts from longer work.

When our daughter Georgia came along, 28 years ago, naturally we read aloud to her as well. “The Very Hunger Caterpillar,” “Carl Pops Up,” “Click, Clack, Moo: Cows That Type,” the Olivia the Pig books, the Frog and Toad tales, anything by April Wayland.

Eventually, we graduated to the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, C.S. Lewis’s “Chronicles of Narnia” — all seven of ’em — and Philip Pullman’s “His Dark Materials.” We continued even when Georgia hit high school while we were living in Abu Dhabi. I remember reading Daphne du Maurier’s “Rebecca” aloud at the round, wood table in our apartment kitchen there and, later, finishing Stephen King’s “11/22/63” at our kitchen island in Hamilton, me trying in vain to hold back tears.

Georgia has returned the favour. On long drives — seeing friends in Paris (the one on the Grand River, not the Seine), dropping down to Buffalo for wings, or visiting family in Montreal and Massachusetts — Georgia reads aloud. Sometimes it’s reading from school texts for her disabilities studies program at TMU. Other times they’re (American) political in nature (“American Carnage,” Hillary Clinton’s autobiography, the Clinton-Louise Penny collaboration or Adam Kinzinger’s memoir, “Renegade”).

But the greatest pleasure, where the magic happens for the two of us, is the morning read.

Our habit began near the start of the pandemic lockdown. With my being forced to work from home, we found ourselves in each other’s face and space every hour of every day. Such a situation could lead to irritation and discord. We found that the physical act of sitting down in the same place around the same time daily to do the same thing — i.e., establishing a routine — is, like the act of love, a mode of communication. It keeps us talking; it brings us closer.

Reading aloud is by force a slowing down; the comfort of hearing the other’s voice in the a.m. puts us in the same place. We are not often in the same place with another person. Life’s demands and our own preoccupations and egos don’t allow it, but beginning the day with the same words in our heads puts us on the same path. Our morning practice became a ritual as meditative as yoga, which in a way it resembles: breath in, breath out, inspiration and expiration being the core of yogic practice and reading aloud.

There are, of course, interruptions. “Can you repeat that line? I missed it.” “Do you believe what he just did?” Repeating well-written sentences, repeating because the reader skipped a word, stopping to spell out or enunciate a foreign word — or even one of those words in English that have been more read in your head than pronounced, pausing to discuss plot or where a writer was going with a certain storyline. “Can we please just get to the part where she jumps under the train?”

Dear reader, you read that right. This spring, summer and a good chunk of the fall was devoted to reading Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina” aloud. A feat! Two feats! We were fascinated and exasperated simultaneously. And for different reasons. Denise remembered reading “Anna” years before and loving the character of Levin. This time, Levin’s vacillations and his ruminations on farming and life among the muzhiks pointed to a self-absorbed immaturity she found hard to indulge.

The juxtaposition of books — what follows what — can sometimes affect or colour how we respond. After Tolstoy, we craved something contemporary (and short) and leaned into “Lessons in Chemistry,” the Bonnie Garmus novel that was adapted for television. We made it almost halfway through and haven’t yet decided whether to bother with the show. The lead character felt like a black-and-white feminist trope with ancillary characters sketched-out stereotypes. We felt preached to. It’s not a subtle book — though neither was “Anna.” Subtlety is what draws and holds us in a great book.

“Lessons” was not the only book we gave up on. Sometimes it’s been by mutual decision; others, one of us simply tired of. We’re attuned enough to each other’s likes and dislikes by now that we can tell when the other has grown disenchanted with a work. (It’s like watching “The Crown.” Denise is fascinated; I pretty much hate the monarchy, fictional or otherwise.) So back to the shelves went “One Hundred Years of Solitude” after maybe getting a third of the way through, even though I had loved Garcia Marquez when I’d read it in university. Anthony Doerr’s “Cloud Cuckoo Land” didn’t get heard past page 50. We discovered that sometimes a book just isn’t meant to be read aloud. The Doerr novel felt like that.

We’re now about 50 pages from the end of Machado de Assis’s “Dom Casmurro.” Denise is occasionally impatient. I am enjoying it. We’re committed to sticking with it, suspecting part of Denise’s issues with the 19th-century Brazilian masterpiece is the singular obsession of the narrator (and hopefully not my narration).

In the end, what has worked in our reading aloud is the love that underpins the sharing, the give-and-take of ideas, the necessity of compromise (please please please can we read this next?) and the knowledge that time is short and the titles to be read exceed even our appetites.