Summer reading

People have been reinventing the way we tell – and hear – stories since there have been human stories to share. The petroglyphs on the cave wall gave way to stone tablets, which evolved to ink and paper. Stories told around the fire turned to families gathered around the radio, then the big screen of the movie theater, and eventually the television in every living room. Now we can stream movies through our laptop computers and read books on our smart phones.

No matter the medium for telling them, there are some stories that become favorites. It is these we turn to again and again, whether cherished family tales or literary classics.

I have told my children stories and read them books since their earliest days. When the older two were babies, I would plop them into their reclined, bouncing baby seats and position myself between the two, a pile of books within reach. Looking at the bright pictures in those books kept the babies quiet for good chunks of time. No matter that my back ached from sitting awkwardly, or that several years later I can still recite, from the memory of sheer repetition, every wildly colored page of the silly, rhyming tale “Giraffes Can’t Dance,” stories were comforting to us all.

We’ve moved on to other favorites, and those babies last week completed kindergarten, where their teacher read aloud each day at snack time. She started with “Charlotte’s Web,” written more than half a century ago by master storyteller E.B. White, one of my favorite writers – both for his beloved children’s classics and his skillfully composed essays.

Each day on the way home, the kids tell me what happened at school – what games they played at recess, what cool project they did in art class, what they wrote in their journals. When they started “Charlotte’s Web,” that story was added to the mix: “Mama, today in ‘Charlotte’s Web’ they went to the fair,” or, “Charlotte laid her eggs,” or, sadly, “Charlotte died.”

When the kindergarten class moved on to the “Little House on the Prairie” series by Laura Ingalls Wilder, my mother dug out the books I’d had as a child so I could reread them as the kids were hearing them in school. They loved that I was reading the same story they were. I loved revisiting a favorite from my own childhood and found it just as engaging, entertaining, and educational as it had been decades earlier during my first read of “Little House.”

The after school conversation evolved from, “Mama, today in ‘Little House on the Prairie’ they lost their dog Jack, and when then they found him Laura thought he was a wolf,” to, “Mama, did you get to the part where Pa saw the wolves?” Instead of the kids telling me what had happened, we were experiencing the story together.

My children have started to read on their own. It’s hard work, learning to read, but the reward is great. As with all good stories, “Charlotte’s Web” and “Little House on the Prairie” offer glimpses into another world – the farmyard and country fair of a half century ago and the dense forests and wide open prairie land of the frontier days. Sometimes the kids make up their own stories, from the pictures in books or the depths of their limber imaginations. When they are tired or bickering with each other, hearing stories read to them still soothes them – and me. Selecting a bedtime story is a cherished part of the day for each child.

Finding knowledge and wonder within the pages of a book is a familiar part of life for my kids, and I hope it always will be. Some of my happy memories of childhood are lazy, hazy summer days spent swinging on the hammock, book in hand, or holed up in my room on a rainy day with a stack of Nancy Drew mysteries for company and entertainment.

I still like my stories best from the paper pages of a real book, and as summer starts, I wonder what stories I’ll discover in the coming months. We’ll all begin together, my children and I, with “On the Banks of Plum Creek,” picking up where their kindergarten teacher left off, leading us into our summer reading.

Original content by Meghan McCarthy McPhaul, posted to her Blog: Writings from a full life. This essay also appears in the June 21, 2013 edition of the Record-Littleton.

The joys of reading

For as long as I can remember, I have loved books.

I have long relished peaceful summer afternoons filled by a compelling novel, chilly winter days nestled by the fireplace with something good to read, or the simple and comforting act of curling up with a bedtime story.

As a longtime reader, and now a writer, I am happy to get behind the local celebration this month of the National Education Association’s Read Across America program, which strives to instill in children a lifelong love of reading.

For the past decade I have worked as a writer, and so I am sometimes invited to serve as a speaker for various groups. This month I have been asked to speak at a local middle school about my work, and to read at a local elementary school during its Read Across America celebration. I consider these invitations an honor, and I hope the students find in books all the joy and knowledge there to discover.

The first stories I remember devouring were the Serendipity books – magical tales accompanied by fantastical drawings of doe-eyed animals and colorful fairy creatures. These were some of the first books I could read on my own, and I read one after another.

Eventually I graduated to the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew, once spending an entire summer day in bed with a stack of compelling mysteries and consuming a large bag of M&Ms and four entire books. Later, it was on to Judy Bloom, V.C. Andrews, and the teenage drama of the Sweet Valley High series. 

Through the years I’ve embraced several favorite authors – John Irving, Tom Robbins, Barbara Kingsolver, Jodi Picoult – reading all the titles I could find by each in the local bookstore or the library. I’ve also gone through phases of reading the “classics,” from Charles Dickens and Mark Twain to Charlotte Bronte and Jane Austen. Occasionally I delve into the timeless poetry of Robert Frost (who for a few years lived and wrote just down the road from my home today), or the work of W.B. Yeats, Maya Angelou, and New Hampshire’s own Donald Hall.

Sometime into my 20s I discovered that E.B. White was not only the author of the beloved children’s book Charlotte’s Web, but also a masterful essayist, and I often return to a collection of his writing when I am between books.

With three young children, I now spend lots of time reading aloud – the zany rhyming tales by Dr. Seuss, the wonderfully silly poems of Shel Silverstein, the mischievous adventures of Curious George, and so many others. We’ve even started on some of the Serendipity books, resurrected from my childhood.

Like most parents, I hope that my kids grow up to cherish many of the things that I do. I’d love for them to play soccer and to find joy in the mountains, to travel to other places and explore close to home, to enjoy gardening and stargazing.

But the affection I most hope to pass on to them is the joy of reading. There is no other adventure that has the capacity to take us so far, to expand our horizons to new people and cultures, to carry us to other times and places.

There is nothing like being lost in the pages of a good book. Reading can take us Across America, and far beyond.

From the Record-Littleton, March 16, 2012.