John Elder, a long‑time professor at Middlebury College, has made reading a central practice in his and his wife Rita’s Vermont home. The pair spend three months each year rereading a monumental novel, most recently George Eliot’s Middlemarch, Herman Melville’s Moby‑Dick and Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. They also read the King James Bible, returning to texts first encountered in his Southern Baptist upbringing, and study Buddhist writers such as Stephen Batchelor alongside classical Western philosophy, especially Stoicism.
Daily, John reads aloud while Rita listens, and the conversation that follows becomes an “essential fact of every day for us,” Elder says. Recent read‑alouds include Elizabeth Strout’s The Things We Never Say, Ann Patchett’s Whistler, Virginia Evans’s The Correspondent, Maggie O’Farrell’s Land and Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain. He notes that The Things We Never Say, Whistler and Land have affected them most powerfully.
In a film directed by Corey Hendrickson, Elder’s reading practice is portrayed as an intentional, slow accumulation of knowledge that “creates a particular kind of associative richness.” A bird can call up a poem, a mountain a remembered passage, and grief can illuminate something read forty years before. The ritual, Elder believes, is a way of living inside books again, slowly, together.