History and bedtime stories

I am not a very consistent bedtime story reader. Truthfully, by the time bedtime rolls around each day I am just about done and the last thing I want to do is spend an extra half hour in their room reading. But we do read, and have read some great books. We just need to do it more often. I need to take less than a couple of months off between books, is what it boils down to...

Adam reads, and reads, and reads, all by himself, and I want to get Ellie there too. When we read 'The Never-Ending Story' last summer, Adam couldn't get enough of it and Ellie left the room most nights. She was totally uninterested. So our next book after that was 'The Secret Garden', mostly because I thought Ellie would like it, and she did. She loved it. They both did. Midway through our reading of it, Adam was off school for a couple of days with a high fever, and he got into bed one night and said despairingly 'I feel just like Colin.' I laughed. I don't think that was what he was expecting!

Our current book is 'The Ogre Downstairs' by Diana Wynne Jones. She is my favourite author ever and I have been so excited to read something that I love with them. 'The Ogre Downstairs' has a special place in our family history - when I was little, and my Mum was wanting to get my brother Mark reading by himself, she sat him down and read The Ogre Downstairs to him, in about three days. And he was hooked. I figure if it worked for him, it will probably work for Ellie. When we picked our book, I also thought it would be good for them to read something a little more up-to-date - 'The Secret Garden' was great, I loved doing the accents, but we spent a bit of time having to explain about houses with servants, horses and carriages, what Mary was doing in India, and just opening their eyes to the Victorian world.

And then we started 'The Ogre Downstairs.' In the first few chapters it references LPs, turntables, styluses, the need to keep your LPs clean and not dusty, ink-wells, blotting paper, discos, television aerials and typewriters. All of these things are possibly even more alien to the children than the Victorian era - they have at least seen enough of that on tv to have a concept of it. But now I am having to explain to them about obsolete technology that they have absolutely no idea about at all!

Fortunately, it is a cracking story and they are hooked, and begging for multiple chapters every night. And I am having fun doing the accents. I am just a little taken-aback to find myself reading a book which was totally comfortable and understandable and even contemporary to me as a child, relegated to the region of far-off history with long-ago things. It makes me feel old!

There are so many great books for children, and great stories will transcend their place in history because they are just great stories. I am just surprised to find that this book is one of them!