Crown of the Dalemark

The kid is so absorbed in Crown of the Dalemarkthat he brought it shopping with him, read it in the car, read it while the husband (who was severely caffeine depleted) and I drank coffee, read it while walking around the fruit shop and kept on reading while I paid for the green groceries. He read it in the car on the way home, and is presently reading it ostentatiously spread across an arm chair.

Every so often he surfaces to provide commentary on the action and to express his amazement at diverse turns of event.

He is such a satisfactory reader, he becomes so engaged with the characters and stories that I wish authors could see him go at it. I think they would be very gratified. The authors I would invite to watching-the-kid-read-their-books sessions would be Diana Wynne Jones, Garth Nix and Sandy Fussell. Everything about him is alert to the book at hand when he reads those authors. He loves plenty of other books, but those are the ones that he keeps on talking about, as if he is going to wake up one day and walk into their worlds and he needs to be prepared.