Chloe has been wanting me to read aloud to her lately, and we settled on The Hobbit. We'd made a stab at reading it aloud a few years ago, and got pretty far...more than halfway, as I recall...before we got sidetracked.
Last night I found my copy, on the bottom shelf of a bookshelf in Ethan's room, with so much stuff piled in front of it that it couldn't be seen. And so we sat down and started reading it. We'd agreed to take turns reading so that I wouldn't give up for my voice giving out, and I found that ten-year-old Chloe has become a fine reader, able now to enunciate and emphasize words appropriately, especially in dialogue, which she now speaks as if acting.
We were reading to a mostly-rapt audience of four-year-old Lily, and we fell into a pattern of me reading Gandalf's part while Chloe read Bilbo's.
With many listenings to audio versions of the book to inspire, I felt like I did a decent gravelly, impatient Gandalf. It was fun. I hope we get to the end this time. It'll require some dedication, but I didn't realize it would be so much fun.
That's fantastic! My Mom read The Hobbit to me when I was a kid. For many years I had a mental image of Hobbits as rabbits dressed more or less like the illustrations of the White Rabbit in a copy of Alice in Wonderland. And the orcs resembled the gorillas in Planet of the Apes.
ReplyDeleteWait, what did your mom do wrong, then?
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