By Susan H. Young
We shouldn't teach great books; we should teach a love of reading.
~B.F. Skinner
I had my daughter, Rosie, hooked on books at an early age. I read to her every night. When Rosie was about eight we changed our routine. We took turns selecting our books and we also alternated reading out loud.
We shouldn't teach great books; we should teach a love of reading.
~B.F. Skinner
I had my daughter, Rosie, hooked on books at an early age. I read to her every night. When Rosie was about eight we changed our routine. We took turns selecting our books and we also alternated reading out loud.
There was no discernible pattern in the books selected. I recall that we began with Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island, enjoying the company of those rough sailors and stumbling over the eighteenth-century seamen's dialect. "Mummy, what is a 'pleasant sittyated grogshop'?" But we loved the book, and learned a lot about pirates and buried treasure.
We laughed and commiserated as we read through the chick lit series of the day, empathizing with the characters in Ann Brashares's The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants and shrieking with laughter at the adventures of the eponymous heroine in Louise Rennison's Confessions of Georgia Nicolson.
Bram Stoker's Dracula took us weeks to read. But it was well worth it for the picture he painted of contemporary Victorian society. Nothing in Stephanie Meyer's Twilight series could compare to the suspense we felt anticipating the Count's next move, even though we were thousands of miles away and safely tucked in bed in our village in southwest Nova Scotia.
In due course Rose grew up and left for McGill University in Montreal. It was a good fit. She had been educated in French and was enthusiastic about speaking the language; she rose to the challenges posed by the new B.A. and Sc. degree. She explored the cafés and boutiques of that cosmopolitan city, acquiring a taste for clothes from BCBG and French Connection, eventually developing an elegant style she could call her own.
Her first visit home to the Maritimes from university was at Christmas. In addition to a snappy, navy, velvet jacket from BEDO, there was another decoratively wrapped gift from her that was very thoughtful, very personal and very touching. Inside the box were six cassettes -- an audio book. It was Sophie Kinsella's The Shopaholic Takes Manhattan, read by Rose, her narrative interrupted occasionally by a giggle or a cough, her voice evoking the enjoyment we shared in reading together in her younger years.
As I write this, Rosalind is a third-year medical student at Dalhousie University doing a surgical clerkship at the QE II Health Sciences Centre. Although we have less time these days to read together we continue to recommend reading material to each other. Our personal interests, hers for medicine, and mine for history, often overlap. We are currently loving The Crimson Portrait by Jody Shields, an exquisitely written novel about the development of plastic surgery during World War I. Our first written collaboration, a photo essay on an aspect of Canadian medical history, will be published this year in the Humanities section of the Canadian Medical Association Journal.
We laughed and commiserated as we read through the chick lit series of the day, empathizing with the characters in Ann Brashares's The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants and shrieking with laughter at the adventures of the eponymous heroine in Louise Rennison's Confessions of Georgia Nicolson.
Bram Stoker's Dracula took us weeks to read. But it was well worth it for the picture he painted of contemporary Victorian society. Nothing in Stephanie Meyer's Twilight series could compare to the suspense we felt anticipating the Count's next move, even though we were thousands of miles away and safely tucked in bed in our village in southwest Nova Scotia.
In due course Rose grew up and left for McGill University in Montreal. It was a good fit. She had been educated in French and was enthusiastic about speaking the language; she rose to the challenges posed by the new B.A. and Sc. degree. She explored the cafés and boutiques of that cosmopolitan city, acquiring a taste for clothes from BCBG and French Connection, eventually developing an elegant style she could call her own.
Her first visit home to the Maritimes from university was at Christmas. In addition to a snappy, navy, velvet jacket from BEDO, there was another decoratively wrapped gift from her that was very thoughtful, very personal and very touching. Inside the box were six cassettes -- an audio book. It was Sophie Kinsella's The Shopaholic Takes Manhattan, read by Rose, her narrative interrupted occasionally by a giggle or a cough, her voice evoking the enjoyment we shared in reading together in her younger years.
As I write this, Rosalind is a third-year medical student at Dalhousie University doing a surgical clerkship at the QE II Health Sciences Centre. Although we have less time these days to read together we continue to recommend reading material to each other. Our personal interests, hers for medicine, and mine for history, often overlap. We are currently loving The Crimson Portrait by Jody Shields, an exquisitely written novel about the development of plastic surgery during World War I. Our first written collaboration, a photo essay on an aspect of Canadian medical history, will be published this year in the Humanities section of the Canadian Medical Association Journal.
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