Books and the lack of them

I love to read.  I love to read to my children.  Iain is learning to read and adores being read to.  During the process of packing up our house in England and deciding what to bring and not to bring Doha, Michael was very clear on one point; bring all books.  Why? Well books; I should say good books, are hard to come by in Doha.  If you can find what you are looking for you will tend to pay 2 or 3 times the price you would in the States or the UK and there are no public libraries.

Our container arrived from England in mid October and we have all our books, the problem is we don't have enough space in the flat to put them out, or enough bookcases.  I have a wall of packing boxes in our dining area just waiting for when we move in April to a villa.


We also have a very long journey to and from school each day.  The round trip takes approximately 90 minutes.  This can vary by 10-20 minutes more or less depending on traffic etc.  I was starting to get sick of listening to music and particularly the boy's choices.  It got me thinking and I remembered that in April '09, in preperation for some long car journeys the boys and I were gong to make I had purchased a collection of 3 of Roald Dahl's books on cd.  The boys and I really enjoyed those.  I began to research online an economical way to continue to download books for the boys to enjoy.  That is when I stumbled across www.audible.co.uk.

For a reasonable £15 fee each month I can download 2 audio-book of my choice and get a good discount on any other purchases.   Considering that any book here in Doha would cost me at least £18.00 to get two for £15.00 was already a savings, a blight small, but it does add up.  The real bonus is that the books would be stored in my itunes so they could be played on the computer, downloaded to my ipod or burned to cd for the boys to listen to in the car or at night.

So far we have listened to three Tumtum and Nutmeg stories by Emily Bearn, The Battle for Christmas by Jeremy Strong, plus the Roald Dahl books numerous times.  Today I downloaded Peter Pan by J.M Barrie and The Treasure Seekers  by Edith Nesbit. Iain was very excited to learn this morning, as we had just finished the third Tumtum and Nutmeg story that I was downloading more stories today. 

Because we spend so much time is the car it is a wonderful was for the boys to be exposed to good literature.  It also keeps our car journeys calm and relaxed especially as I have to really concentrate on driving, because the standard of driving here is pretty terrible.  My one tip about audio-books, always, always download/purchase unabridged versions.