Dre and I are back into the habit of reading books aloud to each other. This is one of my favorite things to do, a great way to share time with someone — a form of entertainment that’s infinitely more interactive than “the sides of our asses touch while we sit on the couch together.”

We just finished I Was a Rat!, by Philip Pullman, who also wrote the His Dark Materials Trilogy that Andreas and I read last year. Pullman is a fantastic writer, all sneaky plot tricks and solid themes relevant to adults and children, and while “Rat!” was sad in places, it wasn’t the dark opus that the Dark Materials trilogy was. And that doesn’t mean it was any less of a book! It’s a fantastic retelling of a classic fairytail with a clever twist at the end, and made me love my pet rats all the more. (Thanks to Dave for the book!)

Now we’re reading Terry Pratchett’s Soul Music: A Novel of Discworld. Terry Pratchett never ceases to crack me up, and the joy of reading a funny book aloud, is that you don’t experience that embarrassing moment when reading a funny book to yourself and you bust out laughing, and people look over at you and give you that “Laughing at you not with you” smile. It’s nice to laugh out loud together. We like that. (Thanks to Philip Copeland for the book!)