{"id":1108,"date":"2015-12-31T17:13:44","date_gmt":"2015-12-31T22:13:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/derekbruff.org\/blogs\/disfordad\/?p=1108"},"modified":"2015-12-31T17:13:44","modified_gmt":"2015-12-31T22:13:44","slug":"family-reading-time-the-quick-brown-fox-edition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/derekbruff.org\/blogs\/disfordad\/?p=1108","title":{"rendered":"Family Reading Time: The Quick Brown Fox Edition"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Family<\/a>Back in 2014, I blogged about how special family reading time<\/a> has been for my daughters and me. At the time, we had just finished the Chronicles of Narnia series and had started Tony DiTerlizzi’s WondLa series. We’re now in the third and final volume of that series, The Battle for WondLa<\/a><\/em>, and the girls have enjoyed the heroic journey taken by Eva Nine, the main character. DiTerlizzi has a flair for creating unusual and interesting alien creatures, and his chapter illustrations have kept the girls intrigued, even when the pacing of the books has been slow.<\/p>\n

It’s that slow pacing that led me to take a couple of detours from the WondLa series in 2015. After finishing the first WondLa book, we spent a couple of months reading J. R. R. Tolkein’s The Hobbit<\/em>. (Since the girls are only with me 5 nights out of 14 during the school year, it takes a while for us to get through a book.) From the many available versions of The Hobbit<\/em>, I selected The Annotated Hobbit<\/a><\/em> with annotations by Douglas Anderson. Given my experience with the WondLa and Narnia series, I knew that the seven-year-old would be more interested in family reading time if there were illustrations involved, and The Annotated Hobbit<\/em> had more pictures than any other version I could find.<\/p>\n

As it turned out, I’m glad I went with an illustrated edition, since The Hobbit<\/em> was a tough sell for the seven-year-old. The first few chapters feature long passages of dialogue, and, while the twelve-year-old enjoyed Tolkein’s wordplay and character development, the younger one wanted more action and humor. Once Bilbo and his dwarven friends leave the Shire, however, the story picks up. The girls really enjoyed the middle part of the book, with all its adventure and that classic scene with Gollum. (Bet you can guess what kind of voice I used for Gollum!) The epic battles in the back third of the book? Not my daughters’ cup of tea, although they were quite invested in Bilbo’s story by this point, and that carried us through the end.<\/p>\n

After The Hobbit<\/em>, we returned to WondLa for the second book in the series, then detoured again to an unusual choice for family reading time: Ella Minnow Pea<\/a><\/em> by Mark Dunn. I read the book years ago, and I suspected — correctly! — that the girls were old enough to enjoy it. Ella Minnow Pea<\/em> takes place on the fictional island of Nollop, off the coast of South Carolina, where the citizens take great pride in their native son, Nevin Nollop, the originator of the classic pangram “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.” A pangram, as we found out reading the book, is a sentence which uses all 26 letters in the English alphabet. “The quick brown fox” is quite the efficient pangram, with only 35 letters in all.<\/p>\n

Nollop’s most famous sentence is inscribed on a sign in the middle of the island. When letters start falling off that sign, the high council decrees those letters forbidden from use in speech or writing. The first two letters to fall are Q and Z, which pose only minor inconveniences. “Silent” instead of “quiet,” “menagerie” instead of “zoo,” that kind of thing. Some islanders even have a little fun with the new ordinances; local carpenters Buzz and Zeke adopted the new names Li’l Tristan and Prince Valiant-the-Comely. But as more letters leave the sign (J, D, and K are next to go), communication becomes quite challenging.<\/p>\n

What makes the book clever is that the author follows the rules set forth by the island’s high council. The novel is told entirely through letters written to and from various characters, and, as parts of the alphabet become forbidden in Nollop, the proscribed letters disappear from the novel. Much of the fun reading the novel comes from the various workarounds the characters use to avoid the forbidden letters. For most of the book, this is done through the use of synonyms (“menageria” and so on), requiring the reader to have quite the robust vocabulary to follow along. I’m not sure that the kids would have enjoyed reading the book themselves as this age, but having me read it to them was a treat. And I figure each of them picked up fifty new words along the way!<\/p>\n

Also fun: coming up with our own pangrams. At one point in the novel, some of the main characters strike a deal with the island council. If they can come up with a pangram that’s shorter than Nollop’s immortal “quick brown fox” line, the council will reinstate the full alphabet for common use. After reading a couple of attempts by the characters, we took an hour one afternoon to create our own pangrams, seeing how short we could make them. It wasn’t easy! First we had to draft sentences that used every letter in the alphabet. Then we tried editing those sentences to remove as many redundant letters as we could.<\/p>\n