I liked reading to my two sons at bedtime when they were
little, but I had little imagination about what to read
them. I had once bought Beowulf for
myself to read on the train, and not being able to
think of anything better, I read chunks of it to them over the
course of a week. Surprisingly, they liked
it, and I realized, what boy doesn't like stories about fighting a monster, and under water
no less?
I did find one children's story that I liked--Julie of the Wolves, by Jean Craighead
George. It's about a thirteen year-old
Eskimo girl who lives on the North Slope of Alaska who runs away from a marriage
that she was pushed into. Lost on the
tundra, she is accepted by a pack of wolves with whom she learns to communicate
and from whom she receives food, water, and a sense of family. At one point out on the tundra, the girl
sings a song which she had composed. As
soon as I read the first stanza of the song, my older son cut me off and
recited the rest of the song. Apparently, in school someone had read the book to them, and he
was able to recite it from memory.
Around this time, I had been in a Bible
study that was reading the Book of Daniel. Something possessed me to read some of
it to them. I learned right way that
whatever the content was, if I read it melodramatically, my sons found it
entertaining. In that book,
there are characters called satrapies, which were viceroys--public administrators--appointed by the Persian king. Whenever I read a sentence about the satrapies, I read it in a tone as if they were awesome, powerful, fearsome creatures, like a Tyrannosaurus Rex. My
younger son loved it, as if it was a cartoon, and he playfully acted-out trembling in
fear at every mention of the satrapies.
Once I did try reading The Hobbit to them, but it was too
boring for me to tolerate, and I just couldn't do it a second time. They happened to be children when the Lord of
the Rings trilogy, Harry Potter, and many good Disney movies were coming out. But
I think reading books does far more for creativity, the imaginations, and
literacy than watching movies. On
their own, my sons have read all of the Harry Potter Books. They've read some of the Chronicles of Narnia
and at least some of Lord of the Rings. I have never read any of the aforementioned, and at my age, I can;t seem to get into them. When I was a child, I had no knowledge of C.S Lewis or J.R. Tolkien. I had read Daniel Defoe, Robert Louis
Stevenson, Jules Verne, Mark Twain, and Herman Melville.
I don't know why I didn't think of reading any of their books to them.
Scroll ahead about ten years. My older son Andrew came home from high
school one day and said that they had been reading Beowulf in English class. He said that he still remembered the
story from when I had read it to them as children. He said that because of
that, he was able to engage more deeply with the story in class and provide a
more in-depth analysis than the other students.
Today, my older son, a college junior, is a regular reader
and a pretty good writer. But to my great disappointment, my younger son, a
college freshman, does not like to read or write. He is capable of reading and
writing well, but he never does so voluntarily.
I wish I had read better material to them more often. Only this year, did I learn about Grimm's Fairy Tales, for example. Besides being good for
the imagination and helping children get ready to sleep, I think it helps to
build a positive kind of relationship with them that you can build on, as they
get older.
