Storytelling Charlotte's Web

Read by E. B. White. Pathways of Sound, 4 discs, $17.50

THE ONLY book I can remember crying over when I was a kid is E.B. White's Charlotte's Web. I was ashamed for having cried, and I still am, but there was something about the death of Charlotte, a common grey spider, that made me unable to help it. Her death doesn't seem so sad now-all spiders have to die at the end of a year, and Charlotte dies only when her time comes.

But Charlotte's Web is a moving story in other ways: E. B. White is one of America's greatest essayists, as well as one of our greatest storytellers. Listening to him read Charlotte's Web will make you remember some of the more important things you used to know as a kid, but have forgotten. It may also help you to believe (or at least make you want to believe) in some of the things you believed in as a kid, but have lost.

Charlotte, out of friendship for Wilbur, a pig who is to be butchered, promises that she will save him, and does. She does it by playing a trick on Mr. Zuckerman, who owns the farm where Charlotte, Wilbur, Templeton the rat, the cows, and the geese live. She knows that "people are very gullible... easily fooled," so she spins the words "SOME PIG" into her web, in the doorway above Wilbur's pen. Zuckerman is fooled, and decides that "a miracle has happened and a sign has occurred here on earth, right on our farm, and we have no ordinary pig." The local minister explains the miracle in his next sermon. "The words on the spider web proved that human beings must always be on the watch for the coming of wonders." Wilbur becomes a sensation, and a prize pig. Before she dies, Charlotte leaves Wilbur a sack of spider eggs that hatch and provide for Wilbur a new generation of friends for each new spring; protection against loneliness, and proof against time.

Buying a four-disc album of Charlotte's Web might seem extravagant when you can get the book, and Garth Williams' pictures (which the album does not have) for much less money. But hearing E. B. White read is worth something. He wrote Charlotte's Web to be read aloud, and in his straight forward style with his traces of Maine accent, he reads it as it should be read, speaking from experience about the life on a farm, about "digging reddish" and about wiping one's hands on a "roller- towel. " Maybe, if you have some friends without a grandfather who'll read aloud at the end of the day, you can get the recording of Charlotte's Web for them.