| Heya <<First Name>>,
I have a special treat for you this week.
My friend, the reading expert Dana Wenig, has selected 200 of her all-time favorite kids books for us to share with you.
That’s below.
First, though, I wanted to share one piece of news: LIke many of you, we’re troubled by all the recent Facebook revelations. After a lot of discussion and thought, we’ve begun the process of moving our community onto a new discussion platform.
We’ll keep you posted.
Here’s Dana …
Reading begets reading begets reading
My mother’s older brother (my Uncle Harold) read to my mom, she read to me, and once I learned to read, I read to myself and I’ve never stopped.
 When my daughter was small, I read her the books I loved from my childhood and some new books. My husband does not remember being read to as a child, so I read him my favorite children’s books many years ago. My daughter contributed titles to this list, books she remembers us reading to her, many of which she went on to read to herself.
I hope it’s still common for parents and caregivers to read children a bedtime story but reading aloud isn’t just for bedtime. I read to my daughter during dental work, long car rides, when our car broke down, and on airplane trips.
My mother read to me when I was with her, and when I got older and was ready for books with more complicated themes than “Alice in Wonderland” and “The Wind in the Willows,” my father started handing me books from his shelves. In this way I read, probably sooner than I should have, “Siddhartha” by Hermann Hesse; “Stranger in a Strange Land,” by Robert A. Heinlein; More Than Human, by Theodore Sturgeon; and “Autobiography of a Yogi,” by Paramahansa Yogananda, all before I was a teenager.
And of course dad also gave me “The Hobbit” and the “Lord of the Rings” series.
Laughing so hard she had to stop reading
At twenty-seven, my daughter’s all-time favorite, read-aloud book is still Gerald Durrell’s “My Family and Other Animals” and the second in the trilogy, “Birds, Beasts, and Relatives.”
 When she was five, our family went to Greece to meet our relatives and learn more about our Greek heritage. On a sailboat in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, my mother began reading Durrell’s memoir to her only grandchild.
It’s about his wacky family, his explorations of natural life on Corfu, and about the islanders who befriended him. It is delightful. (Written for adults, it is advised that you read a little ahead for the few “bad” words.)
My mother laughed so hard during a few passages that she had to hand the book to someone else to keep the story going. In this way, our family read this book to each other as a group, over and over again. I’ll never forget it.
Gently interrupting each other
Reading aloud is one of my favorite things to do. When I worked as a bookseller at Seattle’s Ravenna Third Place Books, and we’d have a slow day, I would suggest that we go stand on the corner and read the first few lines or pages of a favorite book, like handing out cookie samples, and invite people into the bookstore to finish the book.
In fact, my husband and I read aloud to each other when we were first dating. He was reading Henry Miller; I was reading Isadora Duncan. We would gently interrupt each other to read a favorite quote.
We still do that.
Reading aloud is for everyone; reading aloud is forever.
Dana’s recommendations are posted on our Book Recommendations page:
Happy reading,
Dana …
… and Jeff, Bob, and Claire
Reading with kids can change the world for the better. |
