Abby: Babe, Stuart Little, and Read-Alouds

Lynness, what do you think of Babe so far? It's often mentioned as a good read-aloud. We just finished Stuart Little and I didn't really care for it. It's kind of strange. I won't go into details unless someone else asks for them. The girls enjoyed it though. (That's what counts right? Ultimately anyway. But I still think it'd be great if I get to enjoy it too.)

We're reading I Houdini: The Amazing Story of an Escape-Artist Hamster by Lynne Reid Banks (who wrote The Indian in the Cupboard). Autumn seems to be enjoying it. Heidi kind of fades in and out of interest and I don't think I care for it much myself. It's very "stream-of-consciousness" since it's from the hamster's point of view. And although the hamster is supposed to be very smart, he tends to ramble. And that is mentioned at the beginning of the book so it's not just my opinion. :) I suppose that's quite an achievement for an author to make it work for an entire book -- but for me -- I start to feel like I'm going to go crazy. I find myself thinking, "Get to the point already!"

To date, from my not-perfect memory, we have read:
James and the Giant Peach (Roald Dahl)
The BFG (Roald Dahl)
The Cricket in Times Square (George Selden)
The Tale of Desperaux: Being the Story of a Mouse, a Princess, Some Soup, and a Spool of Thread (Kate DiCamillo)
A Wrinkle in Time (Madeleine L'Engle)
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (C. S. Lewis)
The Mouse and the Motorcycle
The Spiderwick Chronicles (all four, or five)

And we have tried but been unsuccessful with:
A Little Princess (the language is very old-style)
The Wind in the Willows (I'm not sure why this one flopped. But it did.)
Matilda (I guess the age just wasn't right, that was two years ago and I haven't tried since.)
Ramona (I was too annoyed to continue. I don't think I could do Junie B. Jones for the same reason. We shall see.)

Autumn enjoys reading from the Magic TreeHouse series aloud to me. I think she's read two completely on her own, but it's hard to know for sure. ;) She WAS able to retell the story to me, so even if she missed some words here and there, she still got the gist of the story. She also loves to read Blastoff!, a great series of non-fiction early readers aloud to Heidi.

Does anybody have any ideas on getting a kid excited about reading? Heidi isn't very interested in being read to lately. I read to them at bedtime each night from a chapter book. Sometimes she stays awake for the whole reading, but not always. And she doesn't really talk about the story later. She seems to be in a bit of a slump right now. I read other shorter children's books to her and she loses interest quickly. Even the bug books. And that's saying something because she loves bugs. But she still loves books. She loves to get them every week at the library and she knows where to find the ones she likes. She loves to look at them. She loves to stack them. She loves to collect them. But she doesn't seem very interested in hearing what's in them. It seems decidedly odd. And decidedly Heidi too. Any ideas???