Reading Allowed - Storytime for All Ages
Storytelling is an age-old pleasure which nourishes listeners. Many adults enjoy listening to audio books because hearing stories read aloud benefits adults as well as the young. Recently Dunedin Public Libraries have introduced a new regular event where audiences of all ages can experience literature read live – for free. The event provides an opportunity to rediscover the joy of being read to, and to discover, or rediscover, literature that you have heard about but haven’t necessarily taken the time to read.
The event is called Reading Allowed: Storytime for All Ages and it takes place on the second Wednesday of each month at 5.30pm at the City Library in Moray Place, on the ground floor next to the cube. Reading Allowed is a play on words – indicating that you can hear books read aloud in a traditionally quiet space.
Audiences will hear excerpts from two different classic or contemporary works each month. So far audiences have heard the complete poem The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot which turns a hundred this year, and excerpts from: A Study in Scarlet by Arthur Conan Doyle, Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift, To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, The Matriarch by Witi Ihimaera, and The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien.
Coming up:
Also pencil in this event into your diary for June 8 and July 13.
Each excerpt is 20 – 25 minutes long – with a short interval in between. The library is also recording the reading of selected excerpts, for people who cannot come to the live event. You can listen to the recording of Gulliver's Travels from March 2022 via Scattered Seeds, the library’s digital archive. We will be adding to these recordings the readings which are out of copyright.
The readers, who have volunteered their time to read aloud to the public at Reading Allowed, are Associate Professor Paul Tankard, from English and Linguistics at the University of Otago, and Lorraine Johnston, former Heritage Librarian at Dunedin Public Libraries (DPL). Paul has also occasionally volunteered to help DPL to promote the event online, with some digital magic added into the mix.
Dr Tankard provides some background to the event:
“There are two main threads to our scheme for Reading Allowed. The first and most obvious thread are the age-old practices of family reading, public recitation, and oral storytelling. Through the 500-year Gutenberg era, reading became a mostly private and inward activity, and as it spread throughout society by printing and education, it evolved to be a vital ingredient of personal development and spiritual and psychological formation. Now, in the digital era, all reading – for study or as a leisure pursuit – is increasingly marginalised by attention-disrupting technologies. I wanted, in this instance, to do something to show that reading can be a public, communal, and adult activity.”
“The other thread is, naturally, the books. Ours has been a literate culture for many centuries, with our traditions and stories embodied in literature. Those books won’t read themselves! Our only means of reaping their varied and cumulative rewards and passing them on is by reading them. In Reading Allowed, we want to concentrate on books with strong name recognition and a history of being read: books that people today have heard of and might (rightly) feel they ought to have read, but of which they have had no actual experience. The great books are great because they’re fun, because generations have found them sources of deep and abiding pleasure. Hearing a decent portion of these texts – uninterrupted and without commentary, theory, or advertisement – can take us into the language and story-world, bringing them alive. I hope also it might stimulate participants to seek out and read the whole works for themselves.”
“The practice of reading is good for the mind and the imagination; we all know this. But also, there are certain books that, for the sake of the continuity and progress of human culture, should be read and re-read. I want to marry these two aims.”
There is no need to RSVP for Reading Allowed – just come along to the City Library from 5.30-6.30pm on the second Wednesday of the month.