Welcome to the librarian is in the New York Public Library's podcast about books, culture, and what to read next.

I'm Gwen.

I'm Frank.

And today is World Read Allow Day.

That's right.

Happy World Read Aloud Day, Frank. Happy World Read Aloud Day. I was going to say something else. Gwen, off air, I called her a cookie name. Oh, yes. We're a cookie guy. So World Read Aloud Day is a celebration. I think it's every year on February 1st, right? And it's from an organization

called Lit World, which has been around for, I think, like 10 years. And we at NYPL do a couple

special little things for it. Today, we are doing a very special Facebook live event,

which is sort of similar to the ones that we usually do on Fridays where we do book recommendations, but it's not, and we're going to have five children's librarians come and essentially do a story time. Are you hosting this? Yes, we're hosting it. Really? Yes, and readers services. You can tell me until we were on air that we're doing these other things. It will be in the reader services area. And five children's librarians. We did it last year too, yes, with five children. And they're so good at story time. Like, they just bring these books alive in such a fabulous way. What amazes me is when you watch different children's librarians, it was a period of time when I was taking the children's training and and I got to see a lot of children's librarians do story time. And you think story time is straightforward

and what it is. It's hard. Different librarians, it's hard, first of all, like they're schvitzing by the end of it. Yeah.

And it's like a one person show.

It's like a Broadway show.

But they can be so different.

Like personalities doing a story

time, a read aloud, wildly different styles. It is also really intimidating. It's intimidating

in a way that I didn't anticipate. I've only done a very few story times in my career. I don't

think I'm good at it at all. But it's really like being an actor and kids are so unforgiving. Like adults are, you know,

polite enough to applaud no matter what, basically. But kids, like, you see right away if what

you're doing is connecting with them or not. And it is rough. I mean, I did a story time 11 years

ago in that training. Yeah. Maybe like 11 years ago. And because I know that the kid that I

remember is now like 20. But, um, I think you've told the story when Louise was on. He had like, he had like classic kid face, just like unreadable. No, it looked sort of scowly. God knows what his resting face was if that was it. And I did the story and I was just like, flop, spread, turning the pages. Like, come on, kids. And then I saw, I got to a certain point, a smile started creeping onto his face, and it, like, turned into his actual smile. And I still remember it to this day because I was like, thank God. I reached the kid because they won't fake it. Yeah. It was really nice. Yeah. That kid's in high school now.

He's in college now.

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