As a child in Taiwan, being read to was a rarity. I sincerely cannot recall either of my parents reading to me. Maybe one or two of my elementary teachers read aloud to my classes once in a while. But of course, I wanted stories, just like any child from any culture — so palm puppet shows in the public spaces, Taiwanese opera series on TV, Peking Operas in the theater, and mini series on TV were all part of my story-diet. I wonder if my insatiable appetite for stories contributed to my early reading abilities and habits. But I never really listened to radio plays or audio books. (Don’t even know if they existed in the 60s Taiwan!)
Fast forward almost 40 years from when I started reading… just recently audio books have become my favorite way to “get stories” when I am not reading or simply can’t read — doing dishes, walking down the busy streets of New York City, playing a mindless video game on the computer, and once in a long while, on the treadmill (since I don’t work out at all!) What brought this big change to my story-absorbing life is really my iPod and iTunes. I am a clumsy person who doesn’t have the ability to juggle multiple objects. Walkman and Discman would have never worked for me. But give me a laptop, some sophisticated software, and one little rectangular device, and voila, I can hold the universe of audio-visual stories in one sweep! I don’t just listen to new publications. This summer, I wanted to revisit some favorites.
For the last month, I have been listening to two of my favorite science fiction stories — Ender’s Game and Ender’s Shadow by Orson Scott Card. Even though I don’t quite like overly dramatized audio books and a few voices in each rendition do not quite work for me, I have been mesmerized afresh by these two tales. Listening to them has become my 2008 summer obsession and almost a nightly ritual! It’s probably a terrible thing to do to fall asleep with in-ear-buds feeding the words directly into my brain and sending me to dreamland. But I don’t care. I get a soothing kind of oddity and I have formed an unusually close bond with these two tales.
I am finally getting all the missing bedtime reading-aloud ritual as a young child and absolutely loving it.
-Roxanne Hsu Feldman
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Thank you for sharing, I am always looking for good audio books too and it can be tricky. The Giver by Lois Lowry was published after my school days and I’ve been meaning to read for years now, but never got to it. I finally listened to it on audio book last week. It clearly deserved the Newbery, and, although the reader was no Jim Dale, he was excellent!