Reading With The Kids On Winter Days And Nights

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Earlier this week I re-posted a fun article from BuzzFeed about The 51 Best Lines from Literature.  It was hardly a comprehensive list, but there were a number of good lines, and several from books I’ve never read before, so it gave me ideas for new books to read.  Not that I don’t already have a towering pile on my nightstand and another one in my office, as well as a box of books I just picked up to read over break that’s basically the entirety of Illing Middle School’s LA curriculum, which is sitting beside me as I type.

Last week Cormac finished up the fourth book in the Wings of Fire series, and since the fifth book hadn’t come out yet (it actually just did, and I got it for him for Christmas, but he doesn’t know either of these things) I suggested he pick up something classic.  One day in his Reading class, because he’d finished his book that morning and hadn’t thought to bring his next one with him to school, Cormac had begun reading The Hobbit, and so I suggested he resume that.  And he did.

Unusual for Cormac, however, was that he was having difficulty getting started.  All that stuff in the first chapter about Bilbo’s maternal and paternal ancestors didn’t exactly get him going.  But he had a doctor’s appointment out in Farmington on Monday morning, and on the way home we stopped in the little Boston Market on Farmington Ave, just over the line into West Hartford.  We had some comfort food on that soggy, raw day, and after we’d eaten our fill, I took his book and read about half of the first chapter aloud to him, up to where the dwarves tease Bilbo by singing a song about breaking all his dinnerware.  That was sufficient; Cormac was hooked by then, and is almost a third through the book now.

I haven’t read The Hobbit since the seventh grade!  And though I remember how much I liked it, reading it again (even just snatches before bedtime) reminds me why.  Tonight, I was reading aloud from where Gandalf, Bilbo, Thorin and the other dwarves get captured by goblins during a thunderstorm, and I had to read this one line over again.  It went, “The nights were comfortless and chill, and they did not dare to sing or talk too loud, for the echoes were uncanny, and the silence seemed to dislike being broken—except by the noise of water and the wail of wind and the crack of stone.”  It was that last part I re-read, from ‘and the silence.’ I paused, and then, into our silence, Cormac said, “That’s awesome.  This guy really knows how to write!” When I asked Cormac what he thought was going to happen in the cave, he said, “Something bad.  It’s just like Odysseus and Polyphemus.”  Gotta be proud an 11 year-old can give that answer!

Tonight, I also began reading A Christmas Carol aloud to both Cormac and Elsa.  As a boy, I read and re-read that novel every year at Christmas.  I must have read it every year from second grade till I left for college, and occasionally afterwards.  Both kids know the story, and we’re going to see it at The Hartford Stage this weekend, but this will be the first year I read it to both of them.  Elsa kind of likes getting scared, especially if she can snuggle up next to me while I read.  She just finished the ninth book in The Babysitters Club series, which is about the girls thinking Dawn’s house is haunted, and Elsa loved scaring herself reading that.  So tonight she enjoyed the opening stuff about Marley being dead.  Even though his ghost had not arrived yet, she’s knows it’s coming, and got chills in anticipation. 

Elsa especially likes for me to do voices for different characters.  So I was gruff and loud as Scrooge and meek and quiet as Bob Cratchit; jovial and ingenuous as Scrooge’s nephew and pompous and self important as the philanthropists.  She also really liked the description of the foggy London streets, dark already by three in the afternoon.  Dickens writes, “The fog came pouring in at every chink and keyhole, and was so dense without, that, although the court was of the narrowest, the houses opposite were phantoms.”

Soon we’ll all be on break, and we can spend some quality idle time discovering favorite lines in new (or re-discovered) books.