Everybody loves stories – but only a small percentage of the population have good enough reading skills to find reading a novel an easy and enjoyable experience.
It is not that these people cannot read, but reading more than a page or two is not a relaxing experience. This is because most English-speaking people have not been taught to read using systematic synthetic phonics which enables them to decode words at high speed, by understanding the rules of the English Language. Instead, they are forced to remember whole words which is a much more labourious, and often inaccurate method of reading.
As I said, everybody loves stories – so people who do not read much fiction must rely on movies and TV to get access to stories. The trouble is that movies and TV programs cannot provide the secret ingredient that novels contain.
Novels Contain a Secret Ingredient
Novels enable the reader to get inside someone else’s mind whereas movies only enable the viewer to see what the person does. In a novel we can hear another person thinking and so we get insights into people that we cannot get in any other way – not even by talking with others, because people do not generally share their exact thoughts, instead they modify them to suit their audience.
But Novels Are Made Up
The most common reason people give for not reading novels is not that they find them difficult to read, but that they are made up and so are not true – and so are not as important to read as non-fiction. This attitude misses the point of reading fiction – so if this is how you feel about it then I challenge you to listen to some audio books with your child so you both learn to appreciate that writers of fiction are desperate to tell you important things about having a better life – they just hide their messages in stories so they can attract you to read them.
Developing a Love of Reading Fiction
While teaching a person to read it is important to give them access to stories and novels that will engage and inspire them. If they haven’t yet mastered enough reading skills to read these books, then the use of audio books is a great way to get them started. If you also have the printed book then you could give them the opportunity to follow the text as they listen.
Getting Started – For Free
With millions of books to read, where should you start? The easiest place to start is with the classics – read novels people have loved through the generations.
Groups of people around the world who understand the importance of reading fiction have used the Internet to give people easy access to the text and audio of novels that are out of copyright. The easiest place to start is www.librivox.org which provides audio downloads of thousands of good books. Librivox also provides links for each novel to www.wikipedia.org for background on the book and the author, and to www.gutenberg.org for the text in various formats for electronic devices. Once you get the text onto your computer you can print it on paper if you want.
How To Do It
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Step 1
Pick an appropriate book. I have provided information about six books below so try one of these if you don’t have one in mind. If you find a good book that others might enjoy, share the details with us in the box below.
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Step 2
Download all the material and get it ready to use.
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Step 3
Meet with the others you are going to share the book with and set a time to get started. It is good to pick a regular time – say after dinner or just before bed. If you do a lot of driving you could listen in the car.
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Step 4
Prepare for the first session by reading the background on the author and the book from the Wikipedia articles and making a summary to tell the others. You could cut and paste bits from the articles into your word processor and read them out. Then set up the audio player and get the text so it can be read from the screen or from paper.
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Step 5
The First Session – Introduce the author and the book then listen to the book reading. Anyone who wants to can follow the text at the same time.
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Step 6
Organise the times for the next sessions.
Books to Read and Listen To
Below are details of, and links to, six books that you might enjoy. If you have something else in mind then search the Internet using a search engine, or search the Librivox collection here: Search Librivox Collection or browse the complete catalog in alphabetical order here: Librivox Complete Catalog.
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Anna Sewell – Black Beauty: The Autobiography of a Horse
Get the audio files and links to the E-book on Gutenberg.org and to articles in Wikipedia.org here: Black Beauty by Anna Sewell.
Black Beauty is Anna Sewell’s first and only novel. The story is told in the “first person” (or first horse) as an autobiographical memoir of a highbred horse named Black Beauty, from his carefree days as a foal on an English farm, to his difficult life pulling cabs in London, to his happy retirement in the country. Along the way, he meets with many hardships and recounts many tales of cruelty and kindness. Each short chapter recounts an incident in Black Beauty’s life containing a lesson or moral typically related to the kindness, sympathy, and understanding treatment of horses.
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Daniel Defoe – Robinson Crusoe
Get the audio files and links to the E-book on Gutenberg.org and to articles in Wikipedia.org here: Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe.
Daniel Defoe’s The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe of York, Mariner (1719) is considered by many the first English novel. Based on the real-life experiences of the castaway Alexander Selkirk, the book has had a perennial appeal among readers of all ages-–especially the young adult reading public–-who continue to find inspiration in the inventive resourcefulness of its hero, sole survivor of a shipwreck who is marooned on an uninhabited island. Especially poignant, after more than two decades of unbroken solitude, is the affection that Robinson develops for Friday, another survivor fleeing certain death at the hands of enemy tribesmen from the South American continent.
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Robert Louis Stevenson – Treasure Island
Get the audio files and links to the E-book on Gutenberg.org and to articles in Wikipedia.org here: Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson.
Treasure Island is an adventure novel, a thrilling tale of “buccaneers and buried gold.” Traditionally considered a coming of age story, it is an adventure tale of superb atmosphere, character and action, and also a wry commentary on the ambiguity of morality—as seen in Long John Silver—unusual for children’s literature then and now.
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Mark Twain – The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
Get the audio files and links to the E-book on Gutenberg.org and to articles in Wikipedia.org here: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain.
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (published 1876) is a very well-known and popular story concerning American youth. Mark Twain’s lively tale of the scrapes and adventures of boyhood is set in St. Petersburg, Missouri, where Tom Sawyer and his friend Huckleberry Finn have the kinds of adventures many boys can imagine: racing bugs during class, impressing girls, especially Becky Thatcher, with fights and stunts in the schoolyard, getting lost in a cave, and playing pirates on the Mississippi River. One of the most famous incidents in the book describes how Tom persuades his friends to do a boring, hateful chore for him: whitewashing (i.e., painting) a fence. This was the first novel to be written on a typewriter.
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Jules Verne – A Journey to the Centre of the Earth
Get the audio files and links to the E-book on Gutenberg.org and to articles in Wikipedia.org here: A Journey to the Centre of the Earth by Jules Verne.
Journey to the Interior of the Earth is an 1864 science fiction novel by Jules Verne (published in the original French as Voyage au centre de la Terre). The story involves a professor who leads his nephew and hired guide down a volcano in Iceland to the “center of the Earth”. They encounter many adventures, including prehistoric animals and natural hazards, eventually coming to the surface again in southern Italy.
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H.G. Wells – The Time Machine
Get the audio files and links to the E-book on Gutenberg.org and to articles in Wikipedia.org here: The Time Machine by H.G. Wells.
The Time Machine is a novel by H. G. Wells, first published in 1895, later made into two films of the same title. This novel is generally credited with the popularization of the concept of time travel using a vehicle that allows an operator to travel purposefully and selectively.
Share
If you find a good book that others might enjoy, share the details with us in the box below.
Chris Brooks
Principal
High Performance Learning
I welcome your comments. You can add them below.
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