Books

I have intended forever to do a post (and many posts) about our reading.  I was a voracious reader and no lie one of the best parts of parenting is revisiting the the books I loved with Elizabeth.

As she approached age 5, I kept telling her we were going to start reading chapter books, and she would protest loudly that she DID NOT like chapter books and would not listen.  I pulled out a staple I knew she'd love - Ramona!  And soon after her 5th birthday I started - and for the first few sentences she protested over my reading, but then suddenly was enthralled.  We would read at night before bed, and during the day I'd find her carrying the book around, parroting reading it to her toys or to no one at all.  Beverly Cleary uses the word "scowl" a lot, which was a new word to Elizabeth, but one I heard her repeating over and over - she would speak a little jibber jabber when pretending to read aloud, but throw in scowl and Ramon and Beezus and a few other key words.

After the first few books in the Ramona series we read more classics - A Cricket in Times Square, Ralph and the Motorcycle, Charlotte's Web, the Bunnicula books.  For a while I joked that we weren't reading anything published past 1980.  We did dip into the Magic Treehouse books for a while, but mercifully she got bored with them (but I bet we'll have to revisit with Andrew).  Based on a friend's recommendation, we even read The Hobbit last fall and over the winter.  It took a while, and I wasn't sure it was a good choice, but she was immediately in love with it.  Doesn't hurt that it has one of the best opening sentences in all of literature.  I'll have to write more on our adventures with The Hobbit in December (when the next movie comes out).  I tried once to start The Wind in the Willows but she was not at all interested, so maybe we'll try that again later on.

We've spent some time with the Disney Fairy books, which are good enough in their own way.  The one popular series I simply could not read was the Junie B Jones books.  Like fingernails on chalkboard, and I have discovered I share my hatred with all of my book loving friends.  AND, I also discovered everyone I know also corrects Junie B Jones's atrocious grammar while reading - it's like simultaneous translation, reading the crappy writing and correcting as you read aloud.

I'm already off NaBloPoMo pace - Sunday was too beautiful to spend any time blogging, so writing this Monday and backdating.  So I will end here and divide what would have been a long post into two.