The Great Gift of Reading Aloud by Meghan Cox Gurdon

Another Wall Street Journal article from the Saturday/Sunday, July 11-12, 2015 edition. This one really hit home from many years of reading aloud to my boys. My picks from the article:

I had, incredibly,  just been permitted to leave a Tokyo hospital with our first born, a daughter. .....
     .....I carried the infant to the little room we had prepared for her, sat down in the rocking chair that I had painted before her arrival, and began to read aloud from a book of fairy tales.
     "Long ago there lived a widower who had one daughter," I informed the pudding in my arms.

     My shining role model Lisa [Wolfinger], the vanishing hostess - and as it happens, a film producer and thus no reflexive enemy of the screen - notes: "Creating that world in your head is a muscle that needs to be exercised. Kids now are being spoon-fed the visual storytelling, so there's no reason for them to close their eyes and imagine a world, imagine what these people would look like, the clothes and smells and landscape."

     Wait, I hear an irritated chorus say, what's so bad about the iPad? What about all those zippy interactive storybooks that tiny kids can "read" to themselves? And what about audio books - are they bad too? IPads and audio books have their virtues, but they don't have warm arms, they can't share a joke, and they haven't any knowledge of, or interest in, a particular child. In the case of recorded stories, they can't answer questions or observe a child's puzzlement and know to pause and explain what, say, a "charabanc" is.

How I Found My Future in a Marrakesh Bazaar by Patricia Storace

I don't usually write a post about a newspaper article, but I read this article in the Wall Street Journal and it struck me. Now I want to read some more that Storace has written. Here is what struck me in this article:

     I saw it immediately, propped up against a dressing table - an intricately carved door whose rich, nocturnally dark wood was studded with stars that I would soon learn were formed of brass, camel bone and silver, and which seemed to pulse and shimmer as my eyes moved over them. ...... No matter how long I stared at it, I found more to see.

     "Why don't you take the door?" he asked. It seemed to be a genuine question, gently posed, not the opening of a subtly aggressive sales pitch. It had never occurred to me that I could buy it. I lived in an already crowded studio apartment and, though I often dreamed of doing so, had no prospect of moving. "I'm afraid I have no place for it," I said, apologetic that I had kept him in the shop for so long. "I don't have a house."
     "Don't be afraid," he told me. "A door is the beginning of a house."