Cartime Stories

[cathschaffstump]

Do you read out loud? To your kids? To someone? Do you share stories with others?

Bryon and I occasionally get a hankering to share a literary experience together. We read the Harry Potter books together, mostly me reading and him listening, but sometimes the reverse. It became a shared experience for us. We read Elizabeth Peter's Amelia Peabody books together. I enjoy giving the characters fun voices. I suppose listening to someone else read a book on tape is similar. There's less laughing at goofy mistakes, but it's still the oral/aural tradition.

Bryon and I have decided to read Terry Pratchett's Disc World series on the commute. Pratchett's prose trips me up a wee bit, as his sentences tend to lead one way, but wander actually another. I've read the books that feature Granny Weatherwax and her adventures. No surprise there. I also have enjoyed the Tiffany Aching books he's done, where Pratchett's sentences know exactly where they're going. I guess that's the difference 26 years of writing makes--from 1983, when he wrote Color of Magic to 2009.

I look forward to reading all the books as another shared experience with Bryon. I'd be happy to hear about your experiences in the oral/aural tradition.

Catherine

Originally published at Writer Tamago. You can comment here or there.

Comments

I've read Pratchett in the car to my sweeties before!

[dakiwiboid.livejournal.com]

It's great fun! The only problem is that sometimes I have to stop and laugh before I can finish my sentence, and it's really, really hard to read a brand new book aloud. I need to be at least a page ahead of myself.

[sylvia-rachel.livejournal.com]

I have a six-year-old, so I still read aloud to her quite often. She's also now reading well enough herself that we can take turns reading aloud with only minor scaffolding. One of our current favourites for this is Mélanie Watt's book Chester, in which the author (in black type) and her egotistical cat (in red marker) compete to tell their stories. Sometimes I'm Chester and she's Mélanie, and sometimes the other way around.

In our pre-parenting days, my husband and I read the first three Harry Potters together. Mostly I read and he listened, because, having majored in English and French Lit, and thus perforce done an enormous amount of reading aloud in front of people, I am more comfortable with it (also, I talk less at work than he does, so my voice is less tired at the end of the day). It was a good experience, and I would also like to do it again (maybe with the rest of the Harry Potters, which he still hasn't read!!).

ETA: I meant to add that we don't read aloud in the car -- he's driving, and I get carsick if I read (a legacy of pregnancy, it appears, because I never used to). Neither of us has ever commuted by car, either, so I was on my second reading of your post before I realized you weren't talking about reading aloud to each other on the bus or subway :D

[hermia7.livejournal.com]

My mom fell for my dad when they were living in a christian commune kind of thing in the 70s. He read "At the Back of the West Wind" and "The Princess and the Goblins" out loud to the group (wholesome, no?) and it got her.

When I was a child he read out loud to me every night--my strongest memories are of the Narnia books, starting when I was about 4. He did all the voices. (He was a drama major in college, originally.) It's one of my fondest childhood memories. I love to read out loud and can't wait to read to my kids, but right now I never get the chance because my husband isn't a fan of listening to books, he prefers to read to himself.

[erised1810.livejournal.com]

i hardl yever read audio books .i've had too many ocasions where the narrator was just blegh. i should go t o ashop and buy actual cd's of the uk hp books. wit hstephen fry i mean, not the ones with jim dale, eep!

[janradder.livejournal.com]

Having worked as a preschool teacher for eight years and having two boys of my own, I've done a lot of reading to kids and, occasionally, I've read aloud to my wife. I really like reading things to people but I hate listening to other people read. For some reason, my brain is unable to keep its attention on the words -- I'll continually wander off in my thoughts unless I really, really concentrate on whatever it is that's being read to me. I've gotten better at it as I've gotten older (when I was a kid I couldn't do it at all -- I just daydreamed too much) but it's still not something I really enjoy.

[frankieb-sq87.livejournal.com]

My mom used to read to me almost every night when I was growing up. My dad would too, on the occasions when my mom couldn't, but it's my mother I remember the most. It's actually one fo the things I look forward to most about having children, sharing the same books I had when I was a child.

[kurtoons.livejournal.com]

In college I used to read Shakespeare aloud for fun, just to enjoy rolling my voice over the languages. The problem, of course, is when you choose, say, your Cookie Monster voice for a minor character who unexpectedly has a five-hundred word monologue which strips your voice...

What... that's never happened to you?

And I used to Madeline every night before she went to bed when she was younger and before I worked second shift. That was a lot of fun. I remember reading her The Hobbit and The Princess and the Goblins and The Story of Doctor Doolittle.

For a while our church had lay readers doing the scripture readings, which I enjoyed; but the pastor dropped it, partially because of a dearth of volunteers but mostly, I think, because some cranky parishioners didn't like it. I didn't do the Cookie Monster, but I had fun trying to differentiate the voice between the prophetic declamations of the Old Testament readings and the conversational tone of of Paul's epistles. (Well, I do Paul as chatty and conversational, anyway).