My father is very into reading aloud. I don’t actually remember how early he started, but for several years he would keep a book in the kitchen, within reach when he’d finished dinner, so he could read a chapter or two when the rest of the family was finishing the meal. He was very skilled at it, and several of the books that I rarely re-read I can still imagine his voice reading aloud. He managed to carry three children under 12 or 13 years old through the Narnia books, A Wrinkle In Time and its sequels, and the entire Hobbit and Lord of the Rings, but although those were the most memorable, I remember that the tradition was very well established by that time.
Before we started those books, I remember him reading some of Grandma’s hand-me-down books, which were mostly animal stories like Brighty of the Grand Canyon, Misty of Chincoteague, and a little yellow-and-red hardback with the cover missing that I think was called Cubby in Wonderland about a bear cub and his mother moving to Yellowstone National Park and having adventures there. I think there was also a book about a dog that was travelling somewhere and got into a lot of trouble with a hunter. There was an illustrated version of The Just So Stories, which caused a few elbow-jabbing fights to determine who got to scoot closest to see the pictured; there was a battered blue hardback of Mother West Wind “Where” Stories, which is similar in form but has very different animals and a sense of place that is more distinctly American, as well as a recurring old bullfrog for Dad to play with a goofy, grumbly, deep voice.
That was one of the memorable things about it. He has a very measured, calm voice, just the right sort of voice for a narrator who has to both keep the attention of three small children and keep them from getting too excited and interrupting; but he also had a lot of fun putting some expression into the dialogue.
Most of the books he read I ended up re-reading later, some of them to practice reading on my own, some of them because I liked them enough to read over and over. This wasn’t a bad thing, on the whole, but it did mean that for most of my favorites I lost that sense of Dad’s voice narrating them–except, for some reason, the first few lines of the book.