Maybe you heard it, too. On Wednesday, all over the planet, the sound of children's reading voices was being carried on a word breeze. It couldn't drown out the usual cacophony, so perhaps you thought you'd just imagined it. But imagining all those voices was the point of World Read Aloud Day.
LitWorld and Scholastic teamed up to celebrate the 14th annual WRAD in 173 countries with 24 hours of free, virtual programming spanning across time zones. Internationally, children's book authors (including Dav Pilkey sharing his upcoming graphic novel Dog Man: Twenty Thousand Fleas Under the Sea) read aloud and offered pre-recorded messages from 13 countries through Storyvoice.
In anticipation of the big day, WRAD author ambassador Rebecca Elliott said, "It's so exciting to know that millions of people are going to be coming together on World Read Aloud Day to celebrate the joy of story-telling and story-sharing, and I just feel so incredibly honored to be this year's Author Ambassador. I can't wait to bring The Owl Diaries along to the celebrations."
 |
|
| WRAD author ambassador Rebecca Elliot reading from The Owl Diaries. | |
Caitlin Cassaro, executive director of LitWorld, noted that "WRAD has morphed into a beautiful world-wide movement, touched and transformed by every child, community, and country that takes part and comes together for this special day."
Billy DiMichele, senior v-p, creative development & corporate social responsibility, Scholastic: "Research continues to quantify the power of reading aloud, from the Scholastic Kids & Family Reading Report which strikingly shows the positive family moments it creates to new, preliminary findings from the University of Trento in Italy that reading to elementary and middle school students can boost intelligence and literacy skills, including vocabulary, comprehension and more."
On WRAD, if you'd dialed up the volume a bit on your imagination ears (you know, the ones that can "hear" the sound of wind or rain or a train just by reading those words on a page), you might just have picked up the sound of voices rising in the Philippines, South Africa, the U.K., Trinidad & Tobago, Japan, Zimbabwe and more.
Indie booksellers listened for the reading voices, too:
Water Street Bookstore, Exeter, N.H.: "It's (always) a good day for a read aloud!"
2 Dandelions Bookshop, Brighton, Mich.: "Today is World Read Aloud Day so we thought we'd each share one of our most favorite books to read aloud. Do you see any of yours in these pictures? It was a CHALLENGE to only pick one--which book do you consider your favorite read aloud?"
Whitelam Books, Reading, Mass.: "Day one of Black History Month AND World Read Aloud Day?! We don't get this confluence often, here are some of our favorite titles celebrating Black joy, perseverance and people!"
Read Between the Lynes, Woodstock, Ill.: "Today is World Read Aloud Day! Here at Read Between The Lynes, our team will be reading Groundhog's Runaway Shadow by David Biedrzycki. Will you be reading aloud today? If so, what book or books will you choose?"
McLean & Eakin Booksellers, Petoskey, Mich.: "Happy World Read Aloud Day to all you readers out there!"
Hipocampo Children's Books, Rochester, N.Y.: "Hipocampo at RCSD School #33 for World Read Aloud Day!"
Canadian Independent Booksellers Association: "Today is World Read Aloud Day! There is something magical about sharing a story with other people. Today, why not spend some time reading aloud to someone you care about?"
I like CIBA's advice to "spend some time reading aloud to someone you care about." WRAD is geared for the kids, but it's also a yearly reminder adults might consider. Maybe you already do.
My wife and I are both lifelong readers, professionally and avocationally. We've read aloud to one another many times over the years, though not habitually. That situation changed last fall when she had surgery on one eye and was unable to read for about six weeks. Audiobooks filled the void at first, but rather quickly I began reading books aloud to her as part of the healing process... for both of us, I suspect. Though I'll never win any awards for my reading voice, there's a gift in the effort. When she was able to read again, my time spent reading aloud declined, but we feel this is something worth sustaining.
In her memoir Coming into the End Zone, the late Doris Grumbach, who read her work in public hundreds of times and had a regular slot on NPR as a book reviewer for several years, wrote: "I dislike reading my work aloud, hearing all the errors that are, too late, cemented into print, noticing the rhetorical slips, the grating infelicities.... The sound of my own voice gives terrible legitimacy to faulty prose."
I'm pretty sure the sound of my pedestrian voice gives no "terrible legitimacy" to anything, but like all those kids who lifted their reading voices to the skies on World Read Aloud Day, I still hope to be part of the global bookish choir. --Robert Gray, contributing editor