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Let’s talk about books shall we?

I’ve read the entire Laura Ingalls Wilder series with Graham and Royal. We’ve decided to start on White Fang, and we just finished it last night. Graham is ready to read just about anything that is concrete at this point, even things for which the material is a little over his head.

Royal hasn’t shown much propensity for reading books at this point, but we’ve just made a new discovery that is working really well for us. Audiobooks. We are going through the adventures of Winnie the Pooh right now, and it’s absolutely wonderful. The reader is from the BBC, and he has a wonderful voice and is really excellent at reading the book.

Amie and I are on the second to last book of the Harry Potter series. This may be the first time that I’ll read the entire series from start to finish. I’d read the first five books back when I was a teenager, but I hadn’t read the ones that were published after I joined the military - the last two. I’m finding that my interest in them grows as we get deeper in. You and I have had several discussions about the nature of emotions and children’s literature. I’m more inclined to believe that very young children can handle complex emotions in books. I’ve noticed that the Harry Potter series pretty much eradicates all emotions in the main characters for the first three or four books. I think this is a weakness of Rowling’s approach, since it actually removes one of the most interesting parts of the story, namely how the protagonist is responding to the challenges he faces. In contrast, I really appreciate how CS Lewis offers very complex emotional situations in his book The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, such as betrayal, fear, courage, and honor.