Not to sound like a hopelessly funky Mandarin American (!), I read my kids
to sleep (in the last phase in which we - Pearl, Lucas and me - were willing
to cooperate in this manner) a number of wonderful things including The
Wizard of Oz (great), Charlotte's Web (great), and then perverse things, or
things began to feel yucky adult and perversely motivated, "James and The
Giant Peach," and "Alice In Wonderland," at least the more I got into
reading them aloud.
The grand finale was getting 300 pages into Moby Dick with the Rockwell Kent
drawings. The text, as most know, gets into occasional rhetorical
discussions of economics, deifics, and what not. But by then Lucas was six
or seven. And we would stop and have critical discussions about what was
going on - the details of which I forget. The upside is that he never lost
his critical sense of evaluating situations. The negative side was that he,
in middle school, began to tell teachers he did not need to read assigned
books, that he had read Moby Dick and that was enough. Graffiti Art became
his great whale in the San Francisco sky, harpooning white and gray walls
with his crew, so to speak. But that's another story.
But bottom line I think inheritance of the intimacy and richness and
implicit trust in hearing voices read stories when you are very young is a
vital and assuring memory thread that helps one get through the rougher
spells and challenges of growing up.
Oh my daughter, four years old and listening to Melville, it was music to go
to sleep by. I guess that's called "meta-level listening"! She never seemed
to object.
Stephen V
> Maurice Sendak writes most of his own books., but not all - Ben recently got
> one out of the library written by Tony Kushner, based on an opera. And he
> illustrated I Saw Esau, that wonderful collection of children's schoolyard
> rhymes by the Opies. I'd say that most picture books have different
> illustrators and writers; the writer/illustrator rolled into one is an
> exception. Funny how having to read out terrible books scars you.
>
> I used to write spells (rhymes) to put under their pillows when my children
> went through stages of having nightmares. It was effective, but was also
> the reason why Zoe told everyone at school that I was a witch.
>
> My experience of taking my children to poetry readings when young was fairly
> positive, and they like going to readings now. But I do remember, when
> Josh was around five, walking out of a reading and him telling me: "I
> clapped everybody except you. I thought your poems were _stupid_." Well,
> out of the mouths of babes...
>
> Best
>
> A
>
>
>
> Alison Croggon
>
> Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
> Editor, Masthead: http://masthead.net.au
> Home page: http://alisoncroggon.com
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