Patricia my favourite bibliophile blogger has asked whether her readers recall being read to as a child. I definitely do. My mother has a fantastic reading voice. I used to fight with my brother over who would get their story read first. I was even recently relating the story of how my mother used to read “What Was That !?” This is the story of a family of bears, and one by one each of the baby bears hears a bump in the night and comes running to the parents’ bed. “What was that?” they cry. “Why it was just the lady bug down the hall, dropping a shoe.” So one by one there is an explanation of the bumps in the night, until there is a huge crash, and every little bug in the house cries out WHAT WAS THAT. It is of course the legs of the bears’ bed giving way under the weight of all the little bears in the bed.
Just at the moment when the bed cracked, my mom would slam the book closed and scare the heck out of us. I loved it every time.
Many years later, my mother worked as a librarian and my teenage self used to sneak in to listen to her read at storytime. I still love being read to, and I love reading to people.