Hmm: new question: He's 2 & 1/52, I don't really know when kids get really able to follow long sequenced (ie: not totally episodic) stories -- any comments on that? Norms for Avg Kids is useful, or connections to related milestones maybe better, something like "about when they start having imaginary friends" (we still don't really know if DS is "gifted" just guessing based on him being wierd, having a lot of knowledge/understanding already, and having two giftie parents. I'm also kinda not sure when/why I get to start being convinced he's genuinely unusual. Sigh.)
DD won't sit through chapter books but she loves long stories at bed times. We'll tell stories from the Bible or stories about her life/our lives and they can be pretty long and she'll still enjoy them. She asks questions about them and wants to be retold her favorite ones often. However, if we sit down a read a chapter book to her she'll lose interest quickly and shut it. Ironically she keeps asking for them, though, and many time will take one of DH or my text books off of the shelf and will asked to be read from them.
Oh, and she's a young 2.
DS was like this for a while. He loved me to read ANYTHING to him, just as long as it was an interesting-sounding story, preferably with good dialogue so I'd inflect my voice in a more varied manner. I read him Harry Potter. He used to gently doze off listening to it. So sweet.
He kind of grew back into short picture books, though. Now that the content of the story matters more to him, we had to go back to things that are not just within the limits of his attention span, but also within the limits of his frame of reference. He'd rather listen to more concrete stories (magic and such being a little too abstract and outside his personal experience) at this point, whereas about a year ago, he'd listen to pretty much whatever, as long as we presented it in an interesting way.
