What I've learned from reading Peter Pan
8:30 p.m. "No, Dad, that's s'posed to be HOOK's voice." My five year old daughter glares at me reprovingly.We are deep into Peter and the Starcatchers, Dave Barry's prequel to Peter Pan, and I'd slipped into Smee's character voice instead of the honeyed menace of Captain James Hook. "Sorry, sweetie," I reply, then clear my throat and continue in a high-pitched mock-Irish accent. (These character voices can be murder on the throat; switching from Hook's oily, rumbling basso to Tink's lilting fairy speech really works the vocal range.)
It didn't take our family a million preachy "why you should read to your kids" articles to be devoted to it. My sweet wife and I are both verbivores by nature and upbringing, and our kids soaked it up from infancy. Indeed, while were pregnant with our second child, our older one would snuggle up on mommy;s belly so they could "listen together" to Green Eggs and Ham. Today, the happiest place in our house is the sun room sofa, aptly sized for two kids, two grownups and a good book. (Yes, two siblings can actually cohabitate the same lap for hours at a stretch without scratching, poking, whining or kicking. Mostly.)
What I hadn't expected as a young parent and now have come to truly appreciate is how much reading aloud does for me. I probably enjoy it as much as the kids do-- maybe more.
For starters, there's genuine relaxation. Reading aloud causes much deeper immersion in the text. One can almost feel an active wavefront of anticipation in the rhythms and emotions of the speech, which, as I interpret it aloud, pulls me forward and deeper into the story. An hour of Harry Potter aloud leaves me calmer and more refreshed than "relaxing" with a news magazine or even my own pleasure reading.
Reading aloud allows reader and listener to dwell within the story longer, too. The summer blockbuster season accustoms us to being force-fed the entire plot, characters and imagery in 90-minute blasts of explosive hyper-stimulation, which, to be sure, I also love. Serializing the story over days and weeks offers time for reflection, anticipation, and a chance to live with people in our minds. Dickens certainly reads differently in a single (massive) sitting than in the original newspaper serialized form in which he was originally published, and was often read aloud. For a sense of that, try some books on tape, an hour at a time during exercise or commuting.
Performing character voices really makes you dwell inside the story, too. While not claiming any great talent as an actor, I have performed on stage many times before, so I'm not unfamiliar with character performance. Not like this, though. Holy smokes, there are a lot of characters in big kid books! You can get away with a single narrator voice in Goodnight Moon, or three or four voices in Cat in the Hat. Come to big books with extended dialogue among multiple characters, and it really demands that each person have a distinctive sound. Even with the kids reading along on the page, you need to dig deep to find a unique tone and style for each. I find broad stereotypes work best, so you'll hear a lot of variations on fake Irish cops, stuffy British butlers, and ersatz Bronx sharpies from me.
If you ever need to know why its important to read aloud, watch C-SPAN for an hour, and listen to the stupefying rhythms of earnest policy wonks. Each sentence carries the same rhythm, the same near-whining rise and fall of pitch. No wonder no one watches C-SPAN. Then turn to "Timothy Tunny Swallowed A Bunny" and play with limerick scansion; or Ferocious Girls, Steamroller Boys and Other Poems In Between and read rhyming verse (without pounding the downbeat, please), and you begin to understand why oratory is a dying art.
Then read J. M. Barrie's original Peter Pan or L. Frank Baum's Wizard of Oz and consider what was seen as age-appropriate language. Would that we all wrote with such grace, such power, such elegance of expression! Comparing that with Captain Underpants makes one question our levels of expectation for elementary-age children. I credit the vintage classics for inspiring spoken constructions from our five year old such as "Surprisingly, I did not go to sleep." Surprisingly.
Speaking of Peter Pan: we do little else. Who knew there were so many forks to his myth? There's Pan as conceived by J.M. Barrie (superior); Peter as homogenized by Disney (good, and familiar to most of us); Tinker Bell's fairy friends as productized by Disney's Pixie Hollow franchise (good, but clearly a modern sentiment running throughout); Peter Pan in Scarlet, the Barrie estate's authorized sequel (terrific; nearly as good as Barrie); and Dave Barry's Starcatchers series (highly recommendable.) Comparing each different take on the character, we delve into the deep questions of "truth" -- is it perfect internal consistency of details? or true to imaginative character?-- and are given permission to create our own versions too, completing our claims of ownership. What a tremendous interior landscape we then inhabit!
6:09 am. My note-taking for this essay is interrupted by my son walking into the sun room, still rubbing sleep from his eyes, Peter and the Shadow Thieves clutched under an arm. Gotta go: there are swords to cross and swashes to buckle. Yarrgh!