Meghan Cox Gurdon writes about the pleasures of reading aloud to your children in the WSJ:

http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-great-gift-of-reading-aloud-1436561248

Certainly in the modern era there is something quaint about a grown-up and a child or two sitting in a silence broken only by the sound of a single human voice. Yet how cozy, how impossibly lovely it is! Unlike tech devices, which atomize the family by drawing each member into his own virtual reality, great stories pull people of different ages toward one another, emotionally and physically. When my children were small, I would often read with my eldest daughter tucked in by my side, the boy draped like a panther half across my shoulders and half across the back of the sofa, a tiny daughter on either knee, and the baby in my lap. If we happened to be on one of our cycles through “Treasure Island,” Robert Louis Stevenson’s swashbuckling classic, my husband would come to listen, too, and stretch out on the floor in his suit and tie and shush the children when they started to act out the exciting bits.

“We let down our guard when someone we love is reading us a story,” Ms. DiCamillo says. “We exist together in a little patch of warmth and light.”

A patch of warmth and light: that phrase brought to mind so many scenes of storytelling by firesides that radiate heat and light, but also cast tall shadows in the dark.  There is something warm, wonderful, and comforting about stories, precisely because they are the candles that enable us to see shadows and to face down our fears.

I have been reading The Runaway Bunny and other books to my three-month-old granddaughter, and I marvel at how the words in the story enable me to communicate with her, even if she does not yet have the gift of language.

Gurdon’s article reminded me of some of my happiest memories–reading Les Miserables with my children, 8 and 10, who adored the idea of a book that big; then reading Moby-Dick with my son when he was in high school (it gave him some relief from the solitary activity of homework); and reading my children to sleep with The Wind in the Willows, the only book that actually did put them to sleep with its lyrical beauty.