What are you going to do with the kids in the car?

     This morning while checking my emails, I saw an interesting essay in The New York Times Sunday Book Review.  Judith Shulevitz's essay, Let's Go Reading in the Car, made me remember when I traveled with my kids.  Depending on the year, I had one to four of them that I traveled with.
     But I have to admit, Judith had it much easier than I did.  She had a car that would play audiobooks!
     Her daughter was 8 and her son 10, and they would drive two and a half hours up to their weekend house in the mountains, all the while listening to audiobooks.  I thought, "Wow!  That had to be great!"
     And she talked about the different kinds of books they listened to, such as The Chronicles of Narnia, Odyssey, The Railway Children, Peter Pan, and even Ramona Quimby, Age 8.  And Philip Pullman's Golden Compass.
     Judith talked about the power of the spoken word, not showing her children the audiobook cover to influence them, and the excellence of actors who could voice the different characters.
     Now, I have to admit the whole essay had lots of good information in it, but I wondered how my job in this library would have affected my life outside of it back when I had kids at home.  And of course, I wondered what the difference would be today if I could travel with my kids again, by car, to some long-awaited destination.  What would I do to keep them busy, keep them from being so bored that they wouldn't punch and crunch each other in the back seat of a car for two and a half hours?
     Since today we'd have a CD player in the car, I wondered how many of the Schulevitz-mentioned audiobooks we have in our library today.
     I found four Harry Potter audiobooks (Sorcerer's Stone, Prisoner of Azkaban, Order of the Phoenix, and Chamber of Secrets) in our library.  The other books I knew I could order through our Interlibrary Loan System, which is almost as good as having them in our facility.  Just takes a little longer to obtain them, but that could happen, too, if they were checked out from our library by someone else.
     Those audiobooks in Schulevitz's essay I could obtain from the ILS were Roald Dahl's Fantastic Mr. Fox, Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time, John D. Fitzgerald's The Great Brain, Marguerite Henry's Misty of Chincoteague, Phyllis Reynolds Naylor's Shiloh, and E. B. White's The Trumpet of the Swan.
     All well and good, I thought.  Those would fit in with the modern age of MP3s and CDs.  But when I decided to look in our PINES Online Catalogue for just plain books, I found even more that I could read to my children.
     Such as Lemony Snicket's Series of Unfortunate Events, Mary Pope Osborne's Magic Tree House Series, Lois Lowry's The Gooney Bird Series, Megan McDonald's Judy Moon Series, and Judy Blume's The Fudge Series.  We have them all, all those books plus the books for the above mentioned audiobooks!
     I don't know.  Now that I sit here and think about it, it still seems better to sit in the middle of that back seat with a kid snuggled on each side of me and the other two hanging over the back of the seat from the fold-down behind (this was an old station wagon), listening as I read some great adventure to them.  And I, too, always read with a different voice for each character.
     Maybe some things are just better when you read a book together.  Everyone's still quiet and calm and interested.  Some even fall asleep!  And the reading continues, just like an audiobook.  But there's a different feeling to it all, something I'll always cherish.  Maybe it was the snuggling part.