David Kay is a Cornell researcher who has most recently been reading “The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes” to his 12-year-old daughter and CS Lewis’s“ The Chronicles of Narnia” to his 8-year-old son.
A cache of picture books for children is buried, hidden like treasure, in my memory. The recollections are deep and uncertain. But as I have read books out loud to my two children almost nightly over the past decade and more, I have, with a frequently pleasant startle of recognition, uncovered more gold and jewels than ever were buried by Captain Flint on Treasure Island.
Though I have no reporter’s recall, I am certain about all that is important of the enjoyable process that brought these first books into my life. Those moments of rediscovery are the legacy of thousands of nights encompassing bedtime, boundless adventure, a lap comfortable to perfection, and above all else, the cadences of Mom. For in my traditionally configured 1950’s early childhood it was no doubt my mother who read to us children.
By the time I was six or seven, memory traces of books were laid down that are still vivid today. By then, books had enveloped me within a nearly magical spell. Through heavy exposure and personal inclination, I had become an early and avid reader. I could command an endless universe of imaginary worlds to unfold before me, entirely at my pleasure! Trips to the public library to collect sufficiently tall stacks of books became an important fortnightly ritual.
Timid, quiet, and shy to the point of parental anxiety (the second grade teacher who assigned me to the slowest reading group hadn’t a clue that I was reading the “Count of Monte Cristo” at home), books made it possible to explore the delights of passion and friendship, of risk and boldness, and all this while huddling under the covers after lights out with an illicit night lamp. Books became an important way of trying on life for size, testing what might fit. Curiously, I found an echo of this experience while reading out loud to my children years later. This time it was literally trying on diverse voices of different characters in dramatic performance that stretched my rather staid sense of who I was or could be.
A couple of early chapter books remain particularly significant in my memory. “To David from Mommie and Daddy, Christmas 1961” reads my mother’s inscription in the hardbound copy I still have of Arthur Ransome’s sailing adventure story, “Swallows and Amazons.” From the first page I was enthralled as I joined Roger (age 7, like me) in his imagined sailboat, tacking against the wind and towards his siblings across the field at Holly Howe farm. The old-fashioned portrait of English children playing pirate in their sailing dinghies, “Swallows and Amazons,” drew me into thorough acquaintance with nautical adventure, familiarizing this young land-lubber with such phrases as “Jibe-o!” and “thwarts wet with dew”.
Another sort of adventure and fantasy book, read perhaps the following year, lies more darkly across my mind, and not just because of its more brooding thematic material. I can still recall my mother taking me aside one afternoon to show me her copy of “The Hobbit.” I was, she thought, now old and well-read enough to take on this wondrous and imaginative story. Her copy was special and sentimental. A 1938 first edition, with accompanying news clipping of reviews from the Los Angeles press, this was a prized book that her parents had read out loud to her when she was a young girl. The color plates, including one of the dragon Smaug and his horded loot, were spectacular. I devoured the book. A few years later, after I had shared the book with my appreciative classmates, someone stole “The Hobbit” off the playground. I was devastated and frantic. Despite much searching and school-wide pleading, the book was never returned.
As I have read these and other books to my own children, I have sometimes marveled at the growth of the rich storehouse of experience, imagination, and cultural knowledge in our libraries. I am thankful that reading books out loud, an essentially modern version of ancient oral story-telling traditions, releases my poor memory from the responsibility of recall while enabling me to share this accumulating wealth with my children. But in the end, what I admit I have valued the most about reading aloud has been the opportunity to share the most magical parts of my own childhood with my own son and daughter.
Family Reading Partnership
Ithaca, New York
Phone: 607-277-8602
Email: office@familyreading.org
