Reading aloud to family and friends was once an integral part of social life. Sadly, even for children, it has become a lot less common. Yet as Margaret Attwood observed in Negotiating with the Dead, taking in a story through the eyes rather than the ears is a very recent thing. If the earliest stories were oral, told round a fire or by a travelling bard, Biblical tales were read by preacher or pastor to a congregation, and by the head of the family at home. A hundred years ago, families would gather to listen to anything from Dickens to the daily newspaper being read aloud; now, there is an ever-widening gulf between those who grow up feeling that books, and stories, are an integral part of living in a community, and those who don’t. We have turned to other forms of story-telling such as film and TV, in which every detail is fleshed out and a story-teller’s voice is no longer the bridge between the tale told and the world of our imagination. Yet the hunger to be read to is a part of the attraction of literary festivals. Readers who flock to hear authors read their own works are not just drawn by the chance to see what they look like, or to ask questions, but to absorb a story as our ancestors once did.

The Venerable Bede was said to be the first man who could read silently to himself, but what was a milestone in fostering that internal, private dialogue that good readers engage in with good writers, also cut us off from enjoying literature as a communal activity. Many modern novels, such as those of Kafka or WG Sebald, would be impossible to enjoy aurally, whereas others – particularly those in which a novelist seems to be addressing us as an audience – are amplified by being read aloud. The pity is that more of us don’t try to enjoy literature in this way. I know one family who, bored on holiday, took it in turns to read each other Rider Haggard’s classic adventure story, King Solomon’s Mines and loved every minute of it - but this is as rare and quaint as putting on your own plays. The closest most of us come is probably listening to audio-books on car-journeys. There’s no doubt that this method of absorbing a story turbo-charges a child’s vocabulary and grasp of events. My own family has loved not only children’s classics, such as the Naxos recordings of E. Nesbit and Conan Doyle, but David Starkey’s Elizabeth and Robert Harris’s Pompeii. Heard over the car stereo system, what are relatively complex stories become clear and easy to grasp.

For a child, of course, hearing a beloved voice telling them a story is irreplaceable. Perhaps no single act of love is as intimate as holding a child in your arms and laughing together, shivering with anticipation, trembling with indignation and feverish with suspense. A child can enjoy a picture book long before they have learnt any words at all, and go on enjoying being read to long after they are fluent readers, able to tackle the real Alps of literature.

Reading aloud to children means you can enjoy novels (or non-fiction) with them that are at least a couple of years above their own reading age. They can borrow your stamina, as a duckling can swim resistlessly in its mother’s wake. Many classics take a chapter or two to get going, and if you can explain what words mean, or paraphrase difficult passages, tantalise them by asking them what they themselves would do in a similar situation, a child gets swept up. I’ve just finished George MacDonald’s The Princess & the Goblin, which my 9-year-old would not have managed alone but which he begged for each night, once the story was launched. That moment when a child’s eyes begin to shine because they have fallen truly, madly, deeply in love with a story, or a character or with reading itself is one of the most magical imaginable.

Not everybody enjoys reading aloud, and the kind of scene which Victorians illustrated in which a virtuous Papa or Mama read to the whole family by the fire-side is rare. Yet they do exist. Philip Pullman’s wife, Jude, remembers living in “a continual heaven of books” when her own children were young, with anything from the Moomintrolls to Homer as family entertainment. Pullman, who more than held his own with a distinguished cast when he read the narrative in the Cover to Cover audiobook of His Dark Materials, says “Personally, I love reading aloud because I like showing off. It’s the only form of acting that I can do.”

In front of this most appreciative and uncritical of audiences, it’s easy. The more you can vary your accent, pitch and expression, the more your audience will relish it. Songs and poems help break the rhythms, and bring a text closer to the oral tradition. I know one father who, passionate about Lord of the Rings, recorded his own reading of all three volumes for in-car entertainment. Few would go so far. Pullman observes that “if a book is read aloud by a skilful reader who is intelligent enough to know the text and able to express the meaning of a complex sentence, or thought, by vocal inflection, then it helps a young child to “read” a book they might not be able to take in through the eyes. And it forces them to SLOW DOWN, which is a blessing.”

Many parents feel that they are there to read aloud only until a child can read to themselves, but this is something that the best-selling children’s author Francesca Simon is appalled by.

“I think parents punish children for learning to read by withdrawing all the warmth and intimacy of reading aloud,” she says. She and her husband started reading to their son Josh when he was four months old and continued “until he pushed us out of the door at 11.” They used it as an opportunity to read books they had never tried themselves, but always gave him a choice, reading the first chapter and blurb then asking, Which looks good to you?

“A lot of people are very self-conscious about how to read,” she says. “My husband had dyslexia, and it was always a source of anxiety, but doing it year after year he became fluent. Only choose books you both enjoy. It shouldn’t be half an hour of suffering.”

Anthony Horowitz, whose Alex Rider books about a teenaged spy are equally enjoyable to both child and adult audiences, agrees.

“When I was a boy I read Tintin, the only books impossible to read aloud, because Herge created a world I wanted to read on my own. I think when a writer “talks down” to a child the result is a hopeless mess. When you read to a child you’re “talking across”, you have a similar need for pace, humour and good language.”

As story-telling has become fashionable again, often through cross-over books such as Across the Nightingale Floor, there has also been a renaissance in the oral tradition for adults. Many reading groups now encourage people to read passages they found especially good aloud, as a part of discussing the text, and currently, the quarterly story-telling sessions at the Barbican Pit have had Hugh Lupton and Daniel Morden retelling the Iliad and the Odyssey have been a big success. Sold out, the sessions have been extended until 2007.

The Romantic cult of the writer as a man apart from the common herd has emphasised the way that storytellers and their audience have become invisible to each other, but reading their work aloud helps to break down that barrier. As Attwood observes, it makes a text more like a piece of music to be interpreted by different readers and a wider audience. The solitary communion of the silent reader gives us the miraculous illusion of communicating directly with the writer, but when we share a text, either as children or adults it becomes a communal art – something less rarefied, but no less valuable.

The Times, February 2005