Reading Aloud

Well, I haven't posted in over a week, and won't post again for a few days at least (life gets busy!). But I wanted to drop in quickly to simply assure my occasional reader that I am still alive and kicking.

Hey, but I do have a moment to point you to some good reading. Kate Pitrone has a nices essay called On Reading Aloud, which appears over at the Ashbrook Center website. Reading Pitrone brings back my own fond memories of reading aloud to my boys when they were young. Not only brief picture books, but very early on Stevenson's great adventure stories, the Narnia cycle, Milne, E. B. White (that exquisite craftsman), and the wonderful fairy tale fantasies of James Thurber, not to mention countless others.

Pitrone appreciates the special experience of "hearing" great books. Here's a sample:

Happily and suitably, the better language in the better children’s literature grabbed my children’s attention as the books with Disney characters never could. The patterns of the language engaged their ears. My children have remembered those poems of their early childhood for these many long years after I read them, repeatedly read them. Best of all, the patterns of that language engaged our collective minds. I found myself speaking to my children in that kind of language and with the rhythmic patterns of the literature that I read to them. My words felt incomplete unless they had a sort of poetry to them. My tongue sought to replicate what my ear had heard from my own mouth. I found myself needing to speak in complete sentences, needing to complete my thoughts. What a gift to child, to have that in his earliest understanding of language. To deny him the goodness that is our language is to impoverish him, no matter what your other circumstances.