Listen!

Dear Annie,

I offer you one more Peter & the Wolf, although I haven't listened to the whole thing, so I don't know how it comes out.  There's a whole generation that's bonded to anything that Jim Dale says, because he's the voice of the Harry Potter audio books.  I've just ordered a version of Peter and the Wolf read by Dale -- here's a quick sample.  Am curious how it compares to Bernstein.

The music-and-story audios that had a big effect on our family were a handful of CDs from a Canadian group called  Classical Kids.  They're stories combining a young child character with biographical information and music of a major composer.   The first one we hit was Mozart's Magic Fantasy, featuring a girl who wanders into a production of The Magic Flute.  It messes with the plot a bit, given that it's adding a character. 

Then we went on to their best-known recording, Beethoven Lives Upstairs, telling the story of the great composer's life and death from the point of view of a boy whose mother rents a room to the almost-deaf composer.  Great story, lots of funeral scene. 

The girls' favorite, though, was Vivaldi's Ring of Mystery, about La Pieta orphanage in Venice, where Vivaldi taught music to the girls.  The central character is a violinist who goes on an adventure at Carnival time to try to discover her past.  It has a few scary moments, and vivid images of Venice which stuck with our girls until they were high schoolers and we visited the city.

They're good stories, and they implant the music subliminally.  All links above have audio samples attached.  I think some of them may have been turned into movies -- or videos you can find on youtube.  But just sitting at home or in the car listening is a special event.

Love,

Deborah

Family listening

Dear Annie,

Ah, so well said.  And so full of cross-generational memories!  It's wonderful to know that my father read you all the R.L. Stevenson adventures that he read with such relish to me.  No wonder we all love reading with kids so much.  Our imaginations were formed by the voracious reading habits of a quiet Ohio boy of the 1920s whose parents didn't read to him.

There's one reading experience that I discovered with my kids that wasn't a part of my childhood: audio books.  We got into them as a form of entertainment on long trips, then the girls and I would listen in the car when we were running around town, and ultimately the girls would listen to much-loved books over and over again in their rooms.  For reasons I don't quite understand, the audio book experience is different from a parent reading a book.  Sure, there's the obvious difference of having a skilled professional performing the book.  But it also puts parents and kids together on the same side of the experience: we all listen together. 

I never read the Ramona books by Beverly Cleary as a child, and was thrilled to read them to the girls, but the best discovery of all was the
Stockard Channing recordings.  Cleary is so empathetic to Ramona, whatever age she is.  And Channing captures that real understanding of what it's like to be in kindergarten and angry at the injustice of school rules, or in third grade and throwing up in public, or participating in a wedding with too-tight shoes.  Channing adds dimension to the books, without distorting them.

The summer Mona turned 10 and Lizzie was 11 we drove across the country, listening to books on tape all the way.  There was something very odd about listening to P.G. Wodehouse, a wildly witty British author (and inventor of Jeeves the butler) while driving across Wyoming, but it worked!


And of course the ultimate voice/book combination, embedding itself in the brains of an entire generation since 1999, is
Jim Dale reading Harry Potter.  He did all seven books, creating voices for hundreds of characters.  I've already written about his "Sorr-eee, Harr-eee,"
an inflection that's positively contagious.

We wondered at times if the girls' love of some audio books was keeping them from reading on their own.  They always read to themselves, but sometimes audio books trumped reading.  During those in-between years of knowing how to read, but not being able to read everything one wanted to fluently, I think the audios sometimes snuck in as a welcome escape.  And the well-loved ones were welcome background noise: it used to drive me crazy that Lizzie would do math homework while listening to a book.  The homework got done, though, and she's been a committed read-to-herself reader for a long time.  But it was a stage in the process of becoming fluent. 

Love,

Deborah

Family Literary References

Dear Annie,

We've left the hammocks of Maine and are back in DC, at least for a few days -- until we see you at yet another amazing cousin wedding on Friday. 

While the four of us were together, we realized how many times we use little phrases among ourselves that come from books we read years ago.  I think many families have these mutual reminders of things that resonate in books.  Here are some of ours:

"Wick-ee, wick-ee!"

 Not your usual conversational gambit, but it comes up surprisingly often around here.  It's from a long-out-of-print reader called Webster and Arnold and the Giant Box, by P.K.Roche.  It has to do with resisting an overly-controlling older sibling:

"You will be Rocket Mouse," said Arnold. "And I will be Chief.  Now let's get ready to blast off."
"Okay, said Webster.  What does Rocket Mouse do?"
" Rocket Mouse helps the Chief," said Arnold.  "Sh-h! Here's the countdown."
"But what do I do?" yelled Webster.
"Nothing!" yelled Arnold.  "That's what you do! 10...9..."
"Listen," said Webster.  "What is that funny noise?"
"Sh-h!" said Arnold.  "There is no funny noise.  8...7..."
"The rocket is going wick-ee, wick-ee," said Webster.
"The rocket is not going wick-ee wick-ee, said Arnold.  "6...5..."
"I think the rocket is going to explode," said Webster.
"No," said Arnold.  "It is not going to explode.  4...3... "
Webster listened closely.  "Yes," he said.  "I feel sure it is going to explode.  The wick-ee is getting louder."
"It is not!" yelled Arnold.  "The wick-ee is not getting louder!  2...1... blast --"
"WICK-EE!  WICK-EE!  KA-POW!" yelled Webster.  "The rocket is exploding!"
"That does it!"  shouted Arnold.  "I'll never play with you again!  Never! Never! Never!"   And he stamped out of the box.

They eventually reconcile and keep playing, of course. And we keep using wick-ee wick-ee when we hear something that sounds a little off, or during a countdown, or when Ka-pow on its own just isn't quite enough.

"Carry me, carry me!" (in whiny tone)
From one of our favorite Christmas books (also out of print, alas): Angel Mae, by the excellent Shirley Hughes. Mae is a pre-schooler who lives in a walk-up flat with her very pregnant and frequently tired mum:

"Mae got tired too.  She wished she could be carried like a shopping bag.
'Carry me, carry me,' she moaned, drooping on the banisters at the bottom step.  But Mum couldn't carry Mae and the shopping.  Mae was much too old to be carried anyway."

Even when your children are taller than you are, they can get great satisfaction in expressing fatigue with Mae's eloquent moan.


"Don't call me darling -- I'm a driving instructor."
A great line from Saffy's Angel, and one which we've used more in the post 16 year-old years.  It's said with a British accent.

"Sorr-eee, Harr-eee" (British, accent on second syllable)
This is from the great Jim Dale recordings of the Harry Potter books -- a phrase Hermione uses in sing-song inflection throughout all seven books.  Used when apologies come up.  This one escapes my lips most frequently when I'm in public, leading to the occasional funny look.

Another of the joys of reading a lot with one's children.

Love,

Deborah