Emil und die Detektive

We've been listening to this classic, the first time also for me:

J is especially delighted with the Berlin brogue of "Justav" and some of the other characters.

Today we listened to the section where Gustav's friends have agreed to help Emil and are concocting a plan for keeping tabs on the presumed thief, Grundeis. J loves all stories involving the concoction of schemes and plans by children. Practically every thirty seconds he was interrupting the audiobook and, based on what was going on in the story, spinning some scheme of his own for his upcoming playdate with his group of friends. 

Classic sci-fi

In the last few weeks J and I have been reading/listening to Jules Verne's 20,000 Meilen unter dem Meer and listening to H.G. Wells's Die Zeitmaschine.

The Verne is linguistically quite difficult, with long convoluted and periodic sentences. J loves the story, but has asked to postpone reading further (we watched the 1954 Hollywoood film, which satisfied him for now). Die Zeitmaschine is a notch or two down in terms of language complexity and he understands most everything. He has listened with great interest, and it has sparked a lot of great conversations about what he would like to do if he could time-travel, how he sees the future (not nearly so pessimistic as the Wells's Time-Traveller, thank goodness!), etc.