Bed Time Stories

I am reading to my husband. At night. In bed.

Before he developed wet macular degeneration in both eyes, one of Grant’s greatest pleasures was going to bed with a book, reading until he fell asleep. We both read at night, and as we had no television or electronic devices in the bedroom he was adrift.

childhood reading

Then I remembered how wonderful it was to be read to when I was a child and I offered to read to him. I had forgotten that Grant’s taste in books leaned more to the philosophical, or cerebral than mine. My perfect bedtime reading is something like The Thursday Murder Club, good old British whodunits. Like me Grant has a whole wall of books in his study, including ‘books to be read’, plenty to chose from for bedtime reading, however there was a new Ian McEwan book out, one he didn’t have, so off we went to our local indie bookstore, Volume One Books and bought a hard cover copy of What We Can Know.

Once we got into the book it was gripping, exploring a dystopian future, flipping back and forth between 2015 and 2119 where scholars felt nostalgic for our current times. The plot twists with a couple of love stories and a mystery, and the effects of nuclear war kept me awake at night.

Not good bedtime reading. Although I would read it again. In fact we almost began again from the beginning.

However Grant had more books queued up…

The next book Grant tossed on the bed for me to read was a battered pocketbook, Hermann Hesse’s Gertrude, first published in 1910.

I groaned. I’ll never be able to read that tiny print with my eighty-six-year-old eyes.

(BTW. Did you know I am the same age as Margaret Atwood? Just saying.)

Surprisingly the print in this old pocketbook with the ancient, yellowed paper

was quite readable even with only my drugstore glasses. And the story was strangely compelling. It seems we are on a Hesse immersion course, or a ‘Hessepalooza’, carrying on with Under the Wheel, another coming of age story with Hesse, and now tonight, before we go on to Siddhartha and Steppenwolf we will conquer The Journey to the East. In between Hesse we dipped into David Brooks, The Second Mountain. I found his sentences more convoluted than Hesse’s, and harder to read.

It was being read to as a child that motivated me to learn to read. My best friend Roger and I attended kindergarten together and his mother took care of me after school. Every afternoon we would sit in front of the fire (no central heating), and his mother would read to us. At first it was Beatrix Potter, moving on to A.A. Milne but then his mother began reading the Arthur Ransom books and we were hooked. They are wonderful British stories about a group of children who went on great sea faring adventures without adults, books with titles like Swallows and Amazons and We Didn’t Mean to Go to Sea”.

A.A. Milne

The thing was, Roger was beginning to read the Arthur Ransome books on his own and we were the same age. I was competitive and needed to keep up with him. So somehow by age five I also learned how to read. And of course, I read to my children when they were young.

But this hour of reading to Grant every night is different, more meaningful. We enjoy dissecting the story line after, sharing our pleasure with the writing. Or not.

And I am enjoying this reading practice, it’s calming and grounding, a good prelude to sleep.

Grant says he feels nourished.

What could be better than that?

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~ Island Crone by Liz Maxwell Forbes