Hi fellow Hiveians,
Today I wanted to appreciate spending some special time with my son reading oldschool fantasy books!
Immersive Enjoyment
Reliving childhood things are perhaps the best times in the world!
I've been very fortunate in a lot of realms. One of the big ones is that my son shares a lot of the same enjoyments as I do, which can be both a blessing and a curse. He gets some of my old bad habits, but hopefully I can mold him out of that haha.
I've been reading to my son for years now at this point, every single night. It's actually one of the best memories I can think of, where I have dedicated time with just him and I at night, with him listening to me and we take a trip down the lane of a story. We had a bunch of different books that we rotated through over the years with the normal ones like Dr. Seuss and others, but this past summer we started to branch out and it's been great!
The little man shares love that I do for fantasy novels. What's not to love about a kids set of fantasy novels!? There's a great, simple plot, with decent characters and a battle between good and evil. All of the elements of enjoyment and a good imagination for a kiddo.
We finished the most recent series a few weeks ago, where it was a series about a kid and magic, with dragons and stuff. It was a decent series, though you could tell it was written contemporarily because it included some garbage about race and pronoun horse shit, but besides that, it was a decent little series and it was also a good introduction for him into real novels.
We graduated from that series into one that I read as a kid, and absolutely loved. It's called the Dark Is Rising, by Susan Cooper, and it's a great series from the 70's or 80's, somewhere that far back where you don't have the technology that we do today sprinkled in the books, but there is a lot of great elements of magic, fantasy and thrill. It also is largely based on the tale of King Arthur, which is a great one that likely all people in their 20's, 30's and older know but the kids of today aren't really familiar, which is sad.
Reading the book to him helps me share in the love and wonder of finding a great story, and one that's got the most important elements in it, without all of the bullshit that's infected modern literature. It's kids, families, love, duty and honor among many other things. It teaches some really wonderful lessons and strangely for the little man, but important for me, is it's JUST words, no pictures besides the cover art!
With the focus on technology that we have today, and all of the visuals associated with that, we need to remember that our imaginations are wonderful things and we can think up a wonderful picture in our mind of the things that occur in a story as long as they give us the words. Reading this series to him, I don't often see him so still and listening! He is being immersed in the world and all of the intricacies that encompass it.
We've finished the first book in the series of five, and I am wondering how quickly we will burn through this series before we have to move onto finding another. I am thinking that The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings are likely going to be the next candidates for me to read to the little man, as they share some of the same elements of wonder and good-natured fantasy that we sorely need in the world today.
What about you, do you try to read to your kids at night? What are some of the books you are digging into, if you are? Let me know in the comments!
-CmplXty. Real human written content, never AI. All pictures are mine unless otherwise stated
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