{"id":23832,"date":"2017-11-30T07:30:36","date_gmt":"2017-11-30T12:30:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/?p=23832"},"modified":"2017-11-30T07:30:36","modified_gmt":"2017-11-30T12:30:36","slug":"reading-is-a-team-sport","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/?p=23832","title":{"rendered":"Reading Is a Team Sport"},"content":{"rendered":"

One busy day in the store recently, I rounded a corner to the endearing tableau\u00a0of\u00a0three little boys intently\u00a0reading a book together,\u00a0along with one of the store’s companionable dragons.
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\nI loved this so much, the simple face-to-face connection, the way one book can bring people together. While this isn’t an unusual sight at the bookstore \u2014 families and friends look at books together all the time \u2014 these\u00a0little guys’ absorbed, shared\u00a0attentiveness went straight to my heart.
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\nWe often think of reading as a solitary act, but really it is\u00a0often most delightful shared (hence book clubs!). We all realize that\u00a0picture books are meant to be shared,\u00a0but so are books for older readers. I’ll never forget the gentle, magical sound of my mother’s voice reading\u00a0The Hobbit<\/em> and The Smith of Wootten Major<\/em>, both by Tolkien, to my sister and me. Having a story read to\u00a0one is luxurious, comforting, and joyful, and I don’t think we ever outgrow it.
\nWhen Katherine Paterson visited the Flying Pig recently, she told the audience a story about her now-grown daughter, Mary, who, back in the day, was going through a rough patch at\u00a0the age of\u00a017.\u00a0Mary\u00a0had enumerated, as teens are wont to do, all the ways her mother had failed her. At the end of the list, Katherine said, her daughter had added, outraged, “And you never READ to me anymore!” It was an eye-opener even to an author who was in the midst of a legendary career writing for young people; she had\u00a0assumed that her fluently reading, nearly adult daughter might be past reading together. What a surprise and a moving delight that she wasn’t.
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I can’t resist sharing this moment after\u00a0Katherine’s\u00a0reading. Is it fair that a writer so gifted, deep, and wise should also be so funny?! (Thanks to photographer Susanne Schmidt for catching the laugh.)<\/p><\/div>
\nTwo days after\u00a0I snapped that quick shot of the boys at the bookstore,\u00a0my sister returned home from her Thanksgiving travels with a box of old photos our uncle had passed along to her, and among them was this picture. Though it was taken\u00a0almost fifty years ago, it seems like a perfect companion piece to the one at the top of this post.
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\nThat’s me on the left, sharing something funny from my Snow White<\/em> storybook with my sister and my cousin. We are giggling.\u00a0We are happy. We are connected by a book.
\nReading together, even reading one’s own book,\u00a0solo, near friends and family members who are also reading books of their own, is such a deep and nourishing pleasure. One of our Black Friday customers explained the reason for the stack of 30 books she was buying that day. “There’s a tradition in Iceland<\/a>,” she told us, “where everybody gives books on Christmas Eve, and they unwrap them and spend the evening sitting around reading together. Everyone I know is getting a book\u00a0this year, and they’re going to open them on Christmas Eve and read.”
\nI’m not sure how I missed hearing about that tradition, but I’m embracing it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What adorable little bookstore readers and Icelandic Christmas Eve revelers have in common…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-23832","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23832","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=23832"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23832\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=23832"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=23832"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=23832"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}