One of the Santa gift kids wanted books on tape, but of course nobody makes tapes anymore. We were able to find a few on CD. Maybe now people just buy audio books online to play on their iPods?

And what the hell happened to the Motherlode blog? Is it my imagination or has it totally gone to pot in the last 6 months or so? I feel like it used to be thoughtful and informative and now it's just one attention-grab after another.

I'm so out of date that I remember -- with fondness -- listening to 45 rpm records of people like Danny Kaye when I was a child. There are a lot of great readings of kid's books these days on audible.com -- I just finished listening again to The Hobbit, which was gorgeously narrated.

This blog post irritated the heck out of me, btw. There are so many wonderful books for kids. Some may be less obvious -- I will never forget listening to my Dad read me Edgar Allen Poe's The Raven, Dickens' Oliver Twist, or some of the funnier scenes in Joseph Lincoln's enormous production of book set on Cape Cod.

We had a copy of The Little Engine that Could that came with a record you could play while you read it. When I was a baby, my brother brought the book along for a three-hour road trip to the beach. He sat in the back seat reading out loud.

"Here comes a shiny new engine," said the little clown who had jumped out of the train. "Let us ask him to help us."

So all the dolls and toys cried out together:

"Please, shiny new engine, do carry our train over the mountain. Our engine has broken down, and the boys and girls on the other side will have no toys to play with and no wholesome food to eat unless you help us."

Ding! Please turn the page.

But the Shiny New Engine snorted: "I pull you? I'm a Passenger Engine. I have just carried a fine big train over the mountain..."

Of course I was too young to remember, but my mom especially delighted in telling that story to friends and family once we grew up, to my brother's chagrin.

Reading to us was a big thing. My dad would sit us in his lap when we were infants and read the morning paper out loud before he went to work. As I grew up, I took over part of the reading duties. I have fond memories of alternating one chapter each of classics like David Copperfield and The Hobbit before I headed off to bed. And, like bearwife and her dad, we read a lot of Edgar Allan Poe -- his stories and poems are great for kids plus we were only a stones throw from his old haunts -- and I can still recite all of "Eldorado" and sections of "Annabel Lee" from memory.

My nephews are way smarter than my brother and I were. They have karate camp this week and last, and on Thursday, they were scheduled for some sort of outdoor activity, but it was too hot, so they got in vans and went to the county library, where my younger nephew, who at five is the youngest kid in the camp, sat and read books out loud to some of the other kids in his age group.

I swear if I hadn't just been reading Watty Piper I would have used fewer commas in that last sentence.

I had Sparky's Magic Piano as a kid, on a 45, one of those novelty multicoloured ones. It was the most wonderful record, I loved the story and the music.

My parents never read to me, ever. But I knew from the first time I picked up a book that reading would play a big part in my life. It still does.

Oh, yes, The Litle Engine that Could! That brings back wonderful memories. And around that time, the Dr. Seuss books, Grimm's FairtyTales, anything by Maurice Sendak, and similar books were happy grist for the parental reading mill.

I also remember getting my first library card with my mom, and takng out books, JUST LIKE HER, with it. That opened up a huge world of books for me.

I must be an outlier. My wife and I read to our boys and, yeah, there were times we didn't feel like it, but the discovery of knowledge with your kiddos always made us come back for more reading. Our oldest learned to speak by "reading" The Little Rabbit to us. By the time he was two, he could recite the entire book to us verbatim even though he didn't really know how to read.