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  • Ode To My Son's Audiobooks
  • Dawn Potter (bio)

My younger son, Paul, is an eighth grader at Harmony Elementary School, a down-at-heels K-8 building in rural central Maine that houses about ninety students and a handful of underpaid staff members. So a few weeks ago, when he carelessly remarked, as he was pacing around the kitchen gobbling a pastrami sandwich, "You know, Mom, I think my writing style is most influenced by Dickens and Twain," I stifled a laugh. Not much Dickens gets read at Harmony Elementary School. Yet, with a second sandwich in hand, he continued to chatter on, cogently discussing the novelists' variable syntax and sentence strategies, their interest in the minutiae of dialogue, his own dependence on hearing the sound of a sentence rhythm before knowing what he is going to write, and on, and on. [End Page 589]

My hands buried in bread dough, I turned to gape at him. This boy, devourer of every teen dystopian novel that comes down the pike, not to mention The Comic Book History of the Universe and all of John Tunis's baseball novels of the 1940s, was speaking of Dickens and Twain as if the sounds of their sentences were a part of his own brain structure, his own progressions of thought. Yet he had never read their books. What he had done was buy recordings of them from iTunes and listen to them again and again and again.

Read to your children! tout the school-library posters; and, indeed, as long as your kids remain literary naïfs, reading aloud is a reasonably good way to lure them into books. Although five hundred consecutive performances of Goodnight, Moon can drive a tired father to near-insanity, repetition is what children long for: they need to hear the same words over and over again; and if that comatose parent happens to mumble fork instead of spoon, his toddler will give him an earful. But, as my husband and I soon discovered, a daily read-aloud menu of mediocre children's literature was rotting our cerebella. And if it was softening our brains, how could it really be nourishing our children's?

Herein lies the problem: listening to literature over and over again is invaluable for growing minds of every age, but listening to stupid literature over and over is analogous to existing on a diet of Doritos. Of course Doritos have their charms, just as a certain amount of stupid literature can be tonic and invigorating. For instance, even though my ear finds the dialogue of the Harry Potter novels excruciating ("Harry, don't go picking a row with Malfoy, don't forget, he's a prefect now, he could make life difficult for you . . . " "Wow, I wonder what it'd be like to have a difficult life?" says Harry sarcastically), it thinks that the dialogue of the Hardy Boys' novels is hilarious (Meanwhile, Biff had untied Chet. The heavyset teen had slumped to the ground in a dead faint. "Out cold," Frank said. . . . Chet opened his eyes and blinked. "I'm alive!" he exclaimed. "Thanks, guys.") But how would I know the difference if I hadn't read both? The issue, then, isn't having a reading diet that includes third-rate literature but the importance of developing a close familiarity with complex and various writing styles—of gaining a familiarity with their sounds, patterns, shifts, and surprises of language, character, structure, and theme—and learning to ask conscious and unconscious questions about those elements.

My children were not reading prodigies. Although they were always at the top of their primary-grade reading classes, they, like most of their peers, struggled with the exhaustions of decoding multisyllabic words and tracking syntactically complex sentences. Yet their ears could comprehend those words and sentences—and they were eager to hear them. As their before-bedtime [End Page 590] reader I could not keep pace with their intense interest in stories—particularly Paul's enthusiasm for repetition. Thus I latched onto recorded books as a way to keep him not only engaged in complicated tales but also gainfully distracted from me.

I wasn't altogether comfortable...

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