This is my grandma. She's 85 and has Alzheimer's, but in spite of her short term memory issues I've noticed she can follow the 25-minute plot of an I Love Lucy episode well enough to laugh at jokes near the end of the show that depend on context from the beginning. Considering how much she used to read herself, it seems like she might enjoy being read to now, and I'm betting she'd be able to hang in there for the length of a chapter -- so long as she doesn't have to retain the plot from one reading to the next. Hence, the episodic element. Single short stories and upper el picture books might also work, but I suspect if she could become familiar with a recurring cast of characters (as she's done with the Ricardos and the Mertzes) it would free up even more of her brain power to concentrate on the story. Which means that a series of episodic books would be ideal.
Wednesday, August 12, 2009
Recommendations for Grandma
So far I've come up with:
Tomie dePaola's 26 Fairmount Avenue series
Richard Peck's Grandma Dowdell novels
Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House books
More?
