This is a bit of an oldie, but it's a lovely piece about a father reading Nicholas Nickleby to his son. Okay, so it took them awhile:
It's true: I have spent the past five years reading Dickens' 1839 novel
out loud at bedtime, biting off small chunks of the story in four- or
five-page installments. Why so long? There are several reasons: We
would sometimes go for weeks without dipping back into the book; quite
often, he would zonk out at some point during a night's reading,
forcing me to double back the next time I picked it up; also, I
encouraged him to stop me whenever we got to a word he didn't
understand, which could occur every few sentences but ultimately made
him one of the few kids in his age group who knows what "melancholy"
means.
For all the time it took, both father and son seemed to have enjoyed the book and learned something from it. (And perhaps if the dad knew that some kids who hear Dickens read aloud grow up to win Pulitzer Prizes, he'd have enjoyed it even more!)
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