Another Old Guard literacy thought: since one of the primary uses of written texts for a long, long time was for reading aloud as a group activity, imagine everybody curled up around a campfire or in a rented room one evening as Yusuf reads them the latest set of poems he’s found, in the latest language he’s learning, and everybody else critiques it (Andy: “not enough battle scenes, 0 stars”). Or Yusuf making everybody else take their turns at being the person who does the reading, as he slowly coaxes them into the joys of proper literacy.
And then imagine them still doing this, eight hundred years later, with all sorts of texts - they’ll read each other newspaper articles, books, poems. Nile, who grew up in the era of reading being a silent thing you do individually, except for parents reading to children, is at first really confused by this but she comes to enjoy evenings sitting around doing their own thing while someone reads aloud. She even takes her turn.
(She does try introducing them to audiobooks, and they get enthusiastically adopted for long car journeys, but even Nile admits after a while that as a group activity it’s not really the same thing. Andy’s rendition of Homer is the first time she really gets it.)
