Skip to main content

Short Cut To Reading

My first attempt to introduce J to Harriet The Spy fell flat on its face. She skimmed through a few pages and pronounced that she did not care for the book. This is an all too familiar theme in our household. I am the book scavenger and J is the "rejecter" of them. I read the book myself and really enjoyed it. My sense was, if J could be persuaded to stick with it for a bit she would like it too. I have had similar luck with Enid Blyton books that I have tried to get her interested in. I can't for the life of me understand how a curious kid like J may not enjoy stories of mystery, sleuthing and adventure. But again, I am yet to get a handle on the genres and authors that will click with her consistently.

Recently, I got the audio book version of Harriet The Spy and J is now in love with it - I don't easily give up on books that I believe have potential and will open doors to other worlds of reading. I have no talent for reading aloud and knowing that have never tried to - it makes all the difference to have a book read well or have it read in an insipid way (which is what I will be able to do).

Given the success with Harriet The Spy now, The Little Prince, Treasure Island and Kidnapped in the past, I think I may have found a working solution to J's summary rejection of books I would really love for her to read. Maybe if she listens to the story and likes it enough, she may at some point end up reading it as well. And even she did not, she would have experienced the book in another form. This is not unlike the compromises I make in order to get her to eat healthy even the meal lacks in variety - one big serving of chicken stew with a bunch of vegetables thrown in it instead of trying to get her through a three course dinner.

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...
111 comments
Read more

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...
6 comments
Read more

Carefree Wandering

There are these lines in Paul Cohelo's Alchemist that I love about the shepherd turning a year later to sell wool and being unsure if he would meet the girl there But in his heart he knew that it did matter. And he knew that shepherds, like seamen and like traveling salesmen, always found a town where there was someone who could make them forget the joys of carefree wandering. What is true of the the power of love and making a person want to settle is also true of  finding purpose in life. If and when a person is able to connect their work to purpose they care about, the desire for change disappears. They are able to instead channel that energy into enhancing the quality of the work they are already doing. As I write this, I remember S a brand manager I used to know a couple of decades ago. He worked for a company that made products for senior citizens, I was a consultant there. S was responsible for creating awareness of their new products and building awareness of what already ex...
Post a Comment
Read more