Book Pluck: In Which There is a Beginning At Pooh Corner

Everybody in this house loves a good book. Every week we go to the library, 2 or 3 or maybe more times. Each person maintains their personal stack territorially perched beside their bed and more litter every room of the house.

The other day we were wandering through a cemetery and I saw this grave and thought, there it is, the grave each of should have.

I particularly love how the books are haphazardly shelved. Brilliant.

While we burn through a massive quantity, we have a few we hold on to, check out again and again, renew, and every so often break down and buy. For a while I've thought about spotlighting those lovely diamonds that emerge from the rough of the library bag haul to find their way into our hearts.

The first book we've all fallen madly in love with is the audiobook,  The Collected Stories of Whinnie The Pooh narrated by Stephen Fry, Judi Dench, Michael Williams, Geoffrey Palmer, and others.

With all the British talent, this obviously isn't Disney. Pooh is a charming but a slightly over-comfortable and proud english country gentleman with an over fondness for his own bad poetry. He's more Downtown Abbey or Jeeves and Wooster than Disney's cuddly dim-whit, which is why Stephen Fry realizes him so perfectly.  Piglet is neurotic and manipulative. Eyeore is Snape. Rabbit, who is always surrounded by countless "friends and relations" is perhaps a tad murderous, he at least goes in for kidnapping and marooning. Kanga is insightfully vengeful. And yet they are all incredibly endearing, perhaps because they're allowed to be so smart and honest in each adventure. The kids seem to relate well to the drama of each character's everyday sort of disappointments and successes. I've now listened to each story for hours and I still find myself laughing aloud at parts.

The kids have loved the stories so much they beg to have the CDs taken in the car while we run errands, then back out of the car so they can listen to them in the house, then put in their room so they can fall asleep listening to them again. We've listened to them so much the kids have started quoting parts.

Reuben has started opening each of his kitty stories with a chapter. Yesterday he started a story for me with "Chapter 2: In Which My Kitties Get Themselves Into a Dark Spot"

A few days before that Reuben Miriam and I were hiking. We started to cross a fallen log that was several feet off the ground. Miri became a little nervous and hesitated and Reuben called out, "Miri You Haven't Any Pluck!" a statement Rabbit uses when Piglet becomes nervous about being part of Rabbit's scheme to kidnap baby Roo and hold him hostage until Kanga agrees to leave the forest forever.
Miri, for the record is about 95% pluck, so Reuben's observation got him a wicked glare but she did cross the log, so I guess it worked.