Reading Aloud

We had a very bookish Christmas this past year.  In October or November, I had impulsively picked up in a local independent bookstore a beautifully illustrated edition of The Secret Garden and began to read it aloud to the girls; it so fascinated both of them that they each secretly snuck off with it to read ahead.   At Christmas, then, among other stacks of things -- Noel Streatfeild, Eva Ibbotson, et al., thanks to Amazon's 4-for-3 promotions -- for them to read on their own, I bought the girls a selection of things I thought would make more good reading aloud, and a few weeks later when Daddy hared off to Florida, we settled in with E. Nesbit's 1906 classic, The Railway Children.  We all enjoyed it very much, the girls' first shrieks of laughter arriving quite early on, in Chapter One, at the thought of Three Chimney's garden in the gloom --

    There was a low wall, and trees inside.
    "That's the garden," said Mother.
    "It looks more like a dripping-pan full of black cabbages," said Peter.
    The cart went on along by the garden wall, and round to the back of the house, and here it clattered into a cobble-stoned yard and stopped at the back door.    

and continuing at the children's pitch-perfect dialogue, whose occasional bickering tempers any Victorian sappiness.  Favorite bits have now entered our family lexicon -- "Ripping!" and "My heart's in my boots!" especially.  And when we'd finished reading the book, we watched the 1970 film, the one with Jenny Agutter as Bobbie and Bernard Cribbins as Perks.  That was just as lovely as I remembered it, too, but in a different way, very idyllic and warm-hearted.   (But how creepy that Dr. Forrest is!  I veered wildly between thinking, oh, Bobbie's going to marry him when she grows up! and alarm at how pre-pedophilic he seems at times.  Strange.)

Not long after that, drunk with success, I began The Hobbit. 

 

I thought at first that it might be a little much for the girls -- who are after all only nine and six -- but on the other hand felt that the poetry of Tolkien's prose would surely enchant them.  They laughed heartily at the dwarves' making themselves at home in Bilbo's comfortable hole, and shivered with fear at the trolls in the moonlight.  Daddy took over reading this when he got home -- Bilbo is just about to escape from the dungeon of the king of the Wood-elves.

Santa had also tucked into Julia's stocking Geoffrey Palmer's reading of Just So Stories, which lay forgotten on top of the girls' dresser until not long ago, when Julia unwrapped it and popped the first disc into the player, where it has played almost constantly for some time, as she reads along with the book they'd ignored for years.




This morning, having the luxury of the week off of school, I suggested Anne of Green Gables, and when Laura snuggled up next to me we started reading from the annotated edition.



Julia professed herself uninterested, but halfway along Chapter Two she crept in and settled herself at my side.  Unlike the Nesbit, I was already intimately familiar with this book, but still I could not keep from laughing aloud sometimes --

    [Matthew] said as shyly as usual:
    "Oh, you can talk as much as you like. I don't mind."
    "Oh, I'm so glad. I know you and I are going to get along together fine. It's such a relief to talk when one wants to and not be told that children should be seen and not heard. I've had that said to me a million times if I have once. And people laugh at me because I use big words. But if you have big ideas you have to use big words to express them, haven't you?"
    "Well now, that seems reasonable," said Matthew.

-- as Anne charms us as much as she does Matthew.

Comments

[TeresaC]

This post just flooded my heart with memories of long summer afternoons spent reading aloud and the days that my girls would, quick! get the kitchen picked up so we could devour the next chapter of whatever book we were reading together. It is a powerful thing, the sharing of a book, and my girls are all voracious readers as teens and adults. I still can't believe I can say that. Adults. Is 23 adult? Well, now I'm going to cry, on with the day!