WTH Should I Read This Summer? “The Enchanted Hour: The Miraculous Power of Reading Aloud in the Age of Distraction” By Meghan Cox Gurdon
What the Hell Is Going On
AEI Podcasts
4.4 • 633 Ratings
🗓️ 8 August 2024
⏱️ 45 minutes
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Summary
In this episode of What the Hell’s summer book series, the WSJ’s Meghan Cox Gurdon discusses the wonders of audiobooks, reading aloud, and her book The Enchanted Hour: The Miraculous Power of Reading Aloud in the Age of Distraction (Harper, 2019). The idea of the “talking book” has been with us for almost a century, so why do so many consider audiobooks or books read aloud to us to be cheating? Not only does reading aloud to children and adults bring people closer together, but hearing a book out loud makes it come to life in a special way for the listener. Reading aloud also has incredible benefits for young children and audiobooks have allowed literature to become more accessible to us all.
Meghan Cox Gurdon is a weekly columnist for the books pages of The Wall Street Journal, covering children’s literature as well as a range of titles for adults. A former foreign correspondent and a magna cum laude graduate of Bowdoin College, Meghan has five children with her husband, the English journalist Hugo Gurdon. She is the author of The Enchanted Hour: The Miraculous Power of Reading Aloud in the Age of Distraction (Harper 2019).
Find The Enchanted Hour here.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This podcast is brought to you by the American Enterprise Institute. |
| 0:03.0 | If you like what you hear, please subscribe, rate, review, and share. Thanks for listening. Here's our show. What the hell's going on? What the hell is going on? What the hell is going on? I don't know what the hell he's talking about. You don't have to know what the hell is on it. What hell's the matter with these guys? We don't know what's going on. What hell's going on? |
| 0:01.1 | Who in God's name knows what it's all about. |
| 0:28.9 | Hi, I'm Danielle Pletka. |
| 0:30.5 | And I'm Mark Tiesin. |
| 0:31.4 | Welcome to our podcast. |
| 0:33.0 | What the hell is going on? |
| 0:35.0 | Mark, what the hell this week? |
| 0:36.9 | What the hell is? We're continuing our summer reading series and our summer book series, |
| 0:41.4 | and we're having a different conversation because we're talking with an author of a book |
| 0:44.9 | who wrote a book about reading aloud and also had a wonderful op-ed in the Wall Street |
| 0:50.9 | Journal, an essay in the Wall Street Journal weekend about books to read aloud |
| 0:55.0 | or to read on your audiobooks to read on your summer travels. And so we're just, we just get into an |
| 0:59.7 | interesting discussion about reading aloud, listening to audio books, reading to your children, |
| 1:04.6 | and the value of it. What do you think, Danny? Our mutual, very dear friend, Beth, says to us all the time, says to me all the time. |
| 1:14.1 | I love listening to your podcast because I feel like I'm sitting there in the living room |
| 1:18.4 | with the two of you and it's just like old times. And I think for our listeners today, |
| 1:24.1 | it's going to be a little bit like sitting in a coffee shop with you and me and our |
| 1:29.5 | wonderful guest, Megan Gurdon, and talking about books we love. I don't know whether our |
| 1:34.9 | listeners will share the same experience, but when you start talking about books you love and |
| 1:40.2 | authors you love, it's a rabbit hole and you just go from book to book to book, and that's what we did. |
| 1:46.3 | It's fun because everybody has different tastes and different books they've read. And the best way to find a good book is to hear about a friend who read one and recommended it to you. |
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