The Bibliomanical Mom: Audible to the Rescue

Since I'm a bibliophile, it stands to reason that I want to pass this love on to my children. My daughter, Ari, is four and starting to get into the swing of things with books. My son, Will, is seven and in a program for gifted readers. He spends some time each night reading to us. He's recently learned that he likes audio books. He still likes to be read to as well, so I'm not surprised that he'd love audio books. I can remember us listening to a Halloween audio book together some years back, but we hadn't listened to one together since.

About two weeks back, I had to travel out of town for work for two days. I'm not much of an audio book person, but I have an Audible account that's somewhat neglected, and I figured I'd better make good use of it. What better way to pass the time on my commute than with an audio book? Jim Butcher's Fool Moon was my book of choice. It enticed me on Audible by teasing it was read by James Marsters. I finished the audio book while out of town, but bookmarked various places that I wanted to revisit during our drive to school and work.

I didn't think he was paying attention when I started listening to snippets of Fool Moon during our rides. He didn't say much the first day I listened to bits of it, but the second day, as we neared his school, he began to ask questions about the story and said that he wanted to hear the rest of it. While most of the parts I listened to were fine for him to hear, Harry Dresden is probably not age appropriate listening. The realization that he would gladly listen to a story gave me ideas.

I could use my Audible account to purchase books that we both could enjoy. I get two credits a month. That's more than adequate to purchase one "kid friendly" book and one "mom only" book. I mulled over what should be our first listen for a while. Should it be Harry Potter since I knew he loved the movies or should it be something more along the lines of science fiction? In retrospect, I should've taken him to the site and let him browse the kids section of Audible, but I chose The Lightning Thief as our first read. I'd been reading it off and on, but I thought he might enjoy it well. He absolutely loves it.

Fellow book blogger, Wendy, suggested that maybe Will and I could do a reading/listening of the first two books and then do a viewing of the first two movies. The second movie will be released on August 16th. I think this is a very doable goal for us. And who knows--maybe I'll come to really love audio books after all.

And, of course, I'm always open to kid friendly reading/listening suggestions.