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Friday, March 27, 2020Storytime CaféToday in "Email solicits and services", the NH Humanities Council sent out a link about the power of hearing poetry read aloud. Read-alouds were going to be my topic today anyway, so this was a happy coincidence. People already associate me with reading poetry out loud competitions thanks to my involvement in National English Honor Society and a certain (mostly defunct, gladly) Instagram account memorializing and meme-ing certain past POL assemblies. But reading aloud is one of provinces and services associated with libraries. It's a public service — sometimes controversially so — and listening to someone else reading is one of the ways we develop the reader inside our heads that helps us learn to fluently read silently as adults. I'd like to do a read-aloud each Friday. This was a thing I had intended to develop during break during the new year (seeing as how it's March now, it's pretty obvious how well that's been going), called Hashtag First Chapter Fridays, where for ten minutes each week I would read out loud in the library from the first chapter of a different book, seeing if it had a good hook, or an attractive start to get someone interested in reading more. I still think it's a good idea, and I may swallow my pride and just do them as recordings instead of live performances.  But to start things off, I was going to find some clips from an old ad campaign for coffee. In my early days of working at the library, I had a memory of stumbling on a series of ads featuring some swarthy English gentlemen reading excepts from classic romance fiction in an attempt to sell coffee and an adjacent sophisticated lifestyle. The website hosting the clips doesn't really exist anymore, but there is a fun video analyzing the campaign and its success. What fascinates me is that one of the books read during the second half of the ads was a book I brought home from the library to re-read and had thought I might use as an opening chapter reading, THE ROTTERS' CLUB by Jonathan Coe. While flolloping about on YouTube trying to find a captured clip from one of the Carte Noire readings, I instead tripped over this excerpt of Dominick West reading from the early chapters of THE TRINITY SIX by Charles Cummings. I'd never heard of the book before, but because I do love West's voice, I thought I'd give it a shot. The book quickly veers from a mildly risible espionoir (to coin a phrase) into a successfully captivating lecture about rationed food during the siege at Leningrad. As we react to Governor Sununu's declaration of a state-wide shelter-in-place order, it was gripping to listen to the subsistence and desperation the Russians attempted to survive in 1942. I genuinely recommend clicking that previous link and listening to it. I'm working on getting more and further access to audiobooks so that you can use your public library card to listen to other voices and other stories and continue to develop the reader in your mind to journey to places and opportunities we're not allowed to go anymore. For example, since we can't watch the new James Bond film in April, I think I might luxuriate in the aforementioned Dominick West read the authorized new-ish Bond novel, SOLO. Have a good weekend. # posted by Mr. Russell @ 2:49 PM
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