Issue Date: August 22, 2004
Let your computer read you a story
Reading to a child is one of the great joys of parenthood -- except when you're forced to read the same book a hundred times. "I'm a mother, not a machine!" I wail to my daughter when she insists, "One more time, please." (Of course, she usually wins.) That's why I was happy to find a handful of Web sites that will read stories aloud for me.
The Screen Actors Guild Foundation presents BookPALS, a literacy effort that manages to persuade actors -- good ones -- to read popular kids' books in schools and online. At Bookpals.net, click on "Storyline," then select a book. For example, Elijah Wood reads Satoshi Kitamura's "Me and My Cat?" Non-actor Al Gore reads William Steig's "Brave Irene." (If a laptop isn't handy, your child can always listen to a story over the phone via one of the numbers listed on the site.) Best of all, the readers perform the characters' voices with exactly the same enthusiasm every time.
If you quickly burn through a dozen stories here, you'll find more at Candlelightstories.com. For $9.95 a year, you can listen to children's classics, complete with sound effects and dramatic music. Some are just a few minutes long; others offer enough entertainment for a short car ride. They're in MP3 format, so you can burn them onto a CD for portable listening.
If you want a good bedtime story for yourself -- like a creepy Stephen King novel or a new best seller -- check out Audible.com. Short descriptions under each title give the basic storyline and the audio length. But here you have to pay by the book or get a monthly subscription (up to $19.95 a month).
As I write this, my daughter is listening to Esai Morales read "Private I. Guana," by Nina Laden -- for about the 99th time.
-- Christina Wood
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