Reading to small people

We've been taking the small (but growing) one to storytime at the library on Saturdays. They tend to read things like "Goodnight Gorilla" there. That's all well and good. In fact, the boy has two copies of "Goodnight Gorilla" at home, both of which he likes.

But I've been reading to him whatever I'm reading since, hmm, I guess before he was born. The first thing that struck a chord was Robert Bly's collection of Pablo Neruda and Cesar Vallejo poems, in English and Spanish. They were fun to read in both languages and he seemed to respond well to both. That was back in my at-home days, when he was a few months old.

There have been some misses. Most recently, Yusef Komunyakaa's "Talking Dirty to the Gods," a book I'm not sure I'll finish on my own. It's just dense and not anywhere near as engaging as the title.

Currently, we're disproving the notion that its Komunyakaa's excessive allusions to obscure people with difficult to pronounce names that was that book's killer. We're reading "1491," a very scientific book, a book-length graduate paper, on the people of the Americas prior to Europeans. It's full of tough names.

Last night was hair-washing night, something that's increasingly difficult as the boy's curls grow longer and more entangled. I volunteered to fight that fight and M-N read from the book. She got stuck with a chapter on the Triple Alliance (mistakenly known as the Aztecs) in central Mexico. They had a fondness for polysyllabics gone awry, things like Huitzilopochtli, Tlacaelel and Tlamatinime (go ahead, try to same them aloud).

I had flashbacks to classrooms where we'd go around and everyone read a paragraph. I'd be obsessively counting the heads before my turn and read ahead, hoping for a paragraph that didn't have any words I couldn't pronounce. Then it'd get confused when someone got a short paragraph, or dialogue, and the teacher had him or her read more.

As someone who became a writer, that seems excessively traumatic, in hindsight.

Anyway, the boy is becoming an expert in pre-Colombian civilizations. And his hair is clean, too.