After-dinner reading.

Oooh, here's a good post with a long list (and comments) about books you can read to boys, by a current mum of boys. I've written a few of the titles down that are available in our school library. Thanks April (you sent this link to me ages ago).

Image from amazon.co.jp

I've mentioned here before that I often read to the family while they're finishing up dinner. It's a tradition that we've all grown to love. But, it isn't easy to find books that they'll all enjoy (my boys have a six year age span) and one of them hasn't read before. The eldest is a book worm, he reads at an incredible pace and the others are headed in the same direction, but they all still love to be read to. However, it needs to be fairly fast paced and engaging or I lose them.

We just finished our collection of Ruth Park's "The Muddle-Headed Wombat" stories last night. We've read it so many times that our eldest know knows some of the plots.

I'd love to read other titles, like The Muddle-headed Wombat in the Snow, and "in the Spring", but alas, they are expensive!

However, in the midst of my quick search I discovered that at least some of this series has been translated into Japanese! Amazing.

I'd like to see how they translate Wombat's more endearing characteristics, like his habit of turning words ending in "bble" to longer words by adding "ubble/y" eg. "terribubbly good", and his habit of mispronouncing words or mixing up words, like "Noah's Bark" (for Noah's Ark). I suspect that some of that word-play would be lost in translation.

Next on the list of after-dinner book reads is a trial of a The Hardy Boys book. I don't know if it will be too old for them. We'll see. If that doesn't work, I now have a list of other books to trial.