Meghan Cox Gurdon: Miraculous Power of Reading Aloud in the Age of Distraction

My guest on RIGHT IN DC is Meghan Cox Gurdon, whom I know from a women’s writing group in Washington that meets once a month to talk with different authors, share tips about writing and the love of reading. I’m so excited to welcome her to this podcast today because she has just written a new book called, “The Enchanted Hour: The Miraculous Power of Reading Aloud in the Age of Distraction”. Meghan has been the Wall Street Journal’s children’s book reviewer since 2005. Her work has appeared widely, in publications such as the Washington Examiner, the Daily Telegraph, the Christian Science Monitor, the Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, and National Review. She lives very close to the ‘belly of the beast’, Washington, DC, in Bethesda, Maryland, is married and has five children. In our discussion, we talk about: • Why it is a powerful thing to read aloud • How she came to this idea • The challenge and distraction of technology • How to go about selecting titles to read to your family • The story of her experiment of having a TV/tech-oriented family read aloud books for three months and what happened • How a child’s vocabulary increases by having books read aloud • How looking at pictures in a book affects the brain • How to start reading aloud in your family • The benefits of reading aloud • How books help people connect to each other MORE WEBSITE: https://www.meghancoxgurdon.com/ TWITTER: https://twitter.com/meghangurdon/ BOOK: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0062562819/ ARTICLES BY GURDON REFERENCED IN PODCAST: “The Great Gift of Reading Aloud” (https://theinnovativeparent.io/2016/11/15/wsj-on-the-great-gift-of-reading-aloud/) “Contemporary fiction for teens is rife with explicit abuse, violence and depravity. Why is this considered a good idea?” http://www.michelepolak.com/322fall11/Weekly_Schedule_files/Gurdon.pdf - - - - Gayle Totter's Website: gayletrotter.com/ twitter.com/gayletrotter www.facebook.com/gayle.s.trotter/ instagram.com/gayle_trotter Support Gayle's RIGHT IN DC Podcasts: www.patreon.com/gayletrotter