From: Steven Engelfried <sengelfried>
Date: Fri, 13 Aug 2004 18:03:12 -0700 (PDT)

I enjoyed Maia Cheli-Colando's funny post about her husband's Absolutely Amazing Voices. I still think a good book doesn't need a great reader, just an interested one, but great is even better. My teenage kids and I listened to Heather Alicia Simms' won derful reading of "Make Lemonade" by Virginia Euwer Wolff, then I felt very ordinary by comparison when I read "True Believers" to them out loud. But the writing was still perfect, and we have a different kind of shared experience the second way. I'm cu rious how families view read alouds and audio books. In a way, audiobooks demonstrate the pleasure of a shared family reading experience (I'm thinking of the long?r-trip-where-everyone-listens experience, not of one child listening on a walkman). So t hey should encourage the family to also read aloud at home. But maybe the opposite happens: the parent thinks that you need to be Tim Curry or Jim Dale to make a book come alive. Or do some think that an audio book in the car
 makes reading aloud less important? Not that I have anything against audiobooks, which I love, but I do wonder if there is an impact of audio books on family read alouds...
 
- Steven Engelfried, Beaverton City Library (OR)
  sengelfried at yahoo.com
  
 

Maia Cheli-Colando wrote: CCBCers,

Confession: my husband reads Pooh much better than I.

I am the writer in our house.* In my youth, I was in theatre. Nowadays, I read as much "children's lit" as "adult" literature. The Pooh book we read is in fact MY book that I bought as an adult, entirely for my own enjoyment. (Though since two, my dau ghter has nearly co-opted it.) I have all the right qualifications! And I do read Pooh well.

But Kevin reads it much better than I.

It's not that he has a deeper understanding of story. And I clearly have him well beat on nonfiction books, which he rarely reads to her. But his voices are Absolutely Amazing.

I hold Kevin's father completely responsible for this. Apparently, he had Voices too. He read Pooh to his sons, and the imprint that left is so deep that when Kevin reads Eeyore, he is the only Eeyore I can imagine. If I am fixedly working in the other
 room and I catch only a whisper of Rabbit, I am lost. There is no point in working any longer; I just sit and listen.

Fortunately, many of the books we have bought are newer titles, and I am not constantly subjected to the mesmerizing effect of generations of Pooh Voice. And too, old or new books, they have to be real Characters for it to work; poetry, history or myth d o not bring out the sound.

But I am nervous, because soon my daughter will be old enough for Oz. I have heard rumours of Kevin's father, Jim, reading Oz. I can only imagine what it will do to hear Jack Pumpkinhead or Tik-Tok or the Nome King. I will be lost. I will have to send
 out an "on vacation" notice, and return when Oz is past. Forty books or more!

Maia

* I am "the writer" only for now... my five year old is gaining ground rapidly, and reads voraciously.


Maia Cheli-Colando maia at littlefolktales.org www.littlefolktales.org/reviews


                
--------------------------------Do you Yahoo!? New and Improved Yahoo! Mail - Send 10MB messages!
Received on Fri 13 Aug 2004 08:03:12 PM CDT