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I spent the morning at a correctional facility with the Storybook project listening to women read to me. Well, not me really, since I am merely recording their reading to their children, but I get to enjoy the stories they read nonetheless. I have young children and I read to them or help them read to me every day. I love children’s books and I feel like one of the perks of parenthood is getting to rediscover my childhood favorites as well as discover new books with my children. Of late, I’ve read Holes, a powerfully mystical story about redemption, worth and onions, the entire Mark Brown corpus of Arthur books and Beverly Cleary’s Ramona and Her Father.
Although I adore reading in general, hearing stories read aloud holds my attention and ignites my imagination in a different way than reading silently to myself. I find that spending the morning listening to different women read is a treat as I wonder why they picked the book they did and then listen as they choose different levels of inflection and expression. I’m also aware that these few minutes of reading also comprise a rare moment of quiet and “alone” time they have with their child. Although the solitude remains one-sided, the chance to speak quietly and intimately is palpable. You lose the privilege of being alone with your child in a correctional facility.
And so I started thinking about favorite books from childhood. Granted, a far more light-hearted topic than usual for FamilyScholars, but I’d love to know what your favorite storybooks read to you in childhood were? Who read them to you?
Categories: General
My kids favorite was “The Magician’s Cat”. I did voices.
The only one I recall is “Harold and the Purple Crayon,” which I still think is brilliant. I’m sure I was read hundreds of others – surely someone read me “The Monster At The End Of This Book”? – but I have zero memory of that.
My nieces were fond of “The Monster At The End Of This Book,” but their absolute favorite was Art Spiegleman’s “Open Me! I’m A Dog!,” which they basically memorized.
I know I was read to when I was very young, but that stopped once I learned to read on my own (age 2). I wonder how common that is with early readers.
I have always combed used bookstores; I ramped that up after my daughter was born. Here’s a link to a list of feminist-minded books for kids that we read together. From that list, she really loved “Jesse on the Night Train”, “The Night of the Five Aunties”, anything by Patricia Polacco, anything by Janell Cannon, anything by Tomie dePaola, “Sailing off to Sleep”, and “Into my Mother’s Arms”. She also liked “Goodnight Moon”, “The Velveteen Rabbit”, and the disney copy of “The Hunchback of Notre Dame”. I got rid of a lot of books last year (pay it forward!), but I saved a couple of boxes of her favorites to pass along to her future children.
She’s mostly into vampires, werewolves, witches and dystopian YA fiction now, but she still likes being read to. We’ve even read nonfiction together (like “Tribe of Tiger”).