Trippingly on the tongue: Books to read aloud

We are, predictably enough, a bookish household over here. One of the things Corey and I always daydreamed about before having kids was lazy afternoons like I remember from my own family, with everyone lounging around in various comfy corners of the same room, lost in their respective books.

So now that we have kids, we read to them as much as possible in the hopes of dragooning them into this vision.

I was emphatically never a drama kid; too shy and methodical, particularly once adolescent mortification set in. So I’ve been a little surprised to discover how fun some books can be to read aloud. Partly it’s just hard to be self-conscious around the six-and-under set, and partly I think there’s a secret genius to writing good read-aloud books.

Take Dr. Seuss’s The Sneetches and Other Stories, for example. I never get tired of reading it; at this point I could stand up and declaim any part of the book from memory. I’ve always had a particular soft spot for “What Was I Scared Of?” i.e. the one about the pale green pants with nobody inside them – the nightscapes are delightfully atmospheric, especially considering there are four colours involved. I mean, look at this:

This is a story I adored as a kid myself. If I can’t credit the pale green pants for my love of things spooky, it’s certainly the first example of it.

One that surprised me was The Hobbit. I have a nice oversized copy with full-colour illustrations throughout sitting on the shelf. My then-four-year-old, Rose, was a big fan of Beatrix Potter, so I figured she might enjoy it despite the winding British style, which I found very dry when I first read it in grade five. Once I got going, it actually rolled quite trippingly off the tongue, and by the time we got to Bilbo’s conversation with Smaug, I was full on in love (as was Rose!) Ursula Le Guin writes a lot about the beauty of Tolkien’s prose, but it wasn’t until I read it aloud that I understood what she was talking about. Seriously, I challenge anyone to read that scene without discovering a secret dramatic flair.

Another excellent one that was new to me was Mary Pope Osborne’s Tales from the Odyssey (which comes in two volumes). We have some playbills from the Stratford Festival hanging on the wall, and Rose (whose dramatic flair is no secret at all – she loves being on stage in costumes and makeup) asked me to tell her about them. Odysseus’s adventures particularly piqued her interest, but I sure as hell couldn’t remember them from first year Classics. Osborne’s take on them is crystal-clear, emotional, and engaging, and she doesn’t pull any punches.

We tried Harry Potter next, and interestingly, it was much more difficult to get into for both of us. I think part of it is characters with accents (e.g. Hagrid) that I find difficult to render in my flat Canadian English, but there’s just something about the way it’s put together that seems to work better on the page than it does read aloud. I wonder how much this is a question of personal preference and how much it has to do with the actual structure of the language. Interesting too that the ones easier to read aloud involve more distance from the characters.

Our younger daughter is coming up on four years old now, while Rose – now six – pretty much reads on her own. One of these days I am going to have to try cracking one of these open again and see if I can snuggle up with the two of them a chapter at a time. Geeky bookish parenting daydream: ENGAGE.