Reading Aloud: Lloyd Alexander

This is the first in an occasional series with the catchy title: "Books I read as a kid and books I have since read with my own kids and what struck me about those books then and what strikes me now." First Installment: Loyd Alexander's Chronicles of Prydain (The Book of Three, Taran Wanderer and two others).

These are fantasy adventure books for grade school age kids, published in the 1960's. They have a Lord-of-the Rings-y feel and draw on Welsh mythology (characters from the Mabinogion appear in the book). SGH and I both recall reading them when we were kids. I of course liked Eilonwy, the feisty princess but even then I identified more with the main character, Taran. Eilonwy is too much of a stock character.

What I remember about these books when I was a kid was noticing that they didn't have a lot of description. I decided at the time that this must be a difference between kids books and grown-up books. (This was probably upper elementary or junior high school when I was starting to read Lord of the Rings, also Jane Eyre and various other novels off my parents' paperback shelf.) Grownup books always seemed to have pages and pages of background and description before anything moved anywhere. The Book of Three doesn't begin with any background about the main character, Taran, and only a little about the whole milieu of the story.

So reading it again within the past year, I've determined it is not just a kid book versus adult book issue, but also is deliberate to echo the style of a folk tale or a fairy tale. Something like: "And then they walked along and met a giant." As an aside, I use to wonder why we never found out much detail about the characters in fairy tales either, like what was in their closets or what color the wallpaper was. And the lack of background about Taran is a chief plot point in the whole series.

B1 was exposed to TBOT too young and avoided it for years, pronouncing it creepy even after he read much creepier stuff on his own. About three months ago SGH started reading it aloud to both boys, and we were all (me too) enthralled. SGH has a way with the voices: the self-important errant bard Fflydyr who is constantly being brought up short by his tattletale harp, the whiny ex-giant Glew, the Norn-like enchantresses Orddu, Orwen and Orgoch. B1 loves adventure, but doesn't like wierdness, and the wierdness (the enchantresses calling Taran "my little gosling" but implying they'd really much rather eat him than help him out in any way) is all over these books. B2 just wants everything to turn out all right, which it does in these books. Mostly.

Anyway, one of SGH's particularly charming traits is his the obvious enjoyment he gets from reading to the kids. Reminds me of my father reading us The Hobbit and The Sword and the Stone when we were little. And some years later I recall a sunny day in the High Sierras (the only completely sunny day out of a ten-day trek) where he read us excerpts from of Mark Twain's Roughing It. ("Horace Greeley went down this road once....")

On a not completely unrelated note, birthday salutations to Buce over at Underbelly.