Reading...

Why aren't kids readers any more?

Well – some still are.

When my girls were little girls, I read to them, and I mean I read to them a lot. It started with the board books and Pat the Bunny and Goodnight Moon and Brown Bear, Brown Bear and the singsong sillies of Dr. Seuss. My older daughter had One Fish, Two Fish memorized when she was two, and we’d laugh as we read along, her sitting in my lap in the rocker, with me reading the first part of a sentence, and her finishing it off, smiling and proud. She loved receiving books as gifts - especially big books.



As she grew older, we went to the library together and I let her choose her own books in the children’s section. Some were crap. Some weren’t. But I let her choose. And she watched me looking over my choices, and I’d tell her why I chose what I chose – how much I loved this or that author, and why, and maybe where they were from, if I knew, and why what they wrote mattered to me. And I’d tell it like a story.

My second daughter had the same experience, but doubled, as she watched her sister choosing books and reading them.

And I told my girls how much I loved books, right on down to how they smelled. And we’d open books and smell the pages together. And I told them the pages were a kind of magic, because when you opened up a book and began to read what was inside, you were opening up a new place to go and be inside of, and when you came back out again, there you were, right there in your snuggly chair, and wasn’t that amazing? They loved that – the magic of it. They read a lot.

When my second little one, Blondie, grew, and she came to about the age of five or six, she wanted to collect Sky Dancer books – commercial crappola, in my opinion, riding the wave of popularity of this cartoon show that was popular for a few years –but the books were colorful and magical looking, all pink and purple and sparkly, so we had a weekly ritual of driving a mile or so to our Barnes & Noble and looking at the display rack to pick a new one out, and when there wasn’t one, we talked to the ‘book lady’ and she ordered one for Blondie. Blondie loved that. And I never said her choice was bad – I said wasn’t it wonderful to go to the bookstore and come out with books to keep in her collection? Because there was always more than one book carried out the Barnes door in her little bag.

All of this happened just before the tipping point of the onslaught tidal wave of cells and laptops and MP3s and Game Things and on and on and on.

I didn’t realize until after people started talking so much about the death of reading, that the death of the singular pleasure of holding onto the pages of and reading a book could ever occur.

In my family, reading is like breathing. And I think it’s because of the magic world, the separate world, the girls learned they held in their hands when what they held in their hands was a book. They have all the gadgets, but still they keep reading.

I had some time to breathe freely one day, and in my newly breezy brain walked a memory of a trip my father and I took to the library when I was little. And how we sat together in lawn chairs in the back yard later on when we arrived home, him reading his book, me reading mine, sipping our iced teas under the shade of our gnarly never-pruned mulberry tree, each in our own held and separate world, yet still together. He taught me about the magic of reading. That it was never a chore holding on to the pages. That it was, instead, a tactile magic traveling. In a kind of a generational ceremony, what I’d done was pass the magic on.

I’m no perfect parent, that’s for sure. I’ve made mistakes and I’ve taken missteps, just like anybody does that’s doing a long, hard slog of a job that sometimes seems never-ending. Sometimes you get tired. Sometimes you screw up. Sometimes, you’re just wrong.

But I’m so relieved that, on the list of good things I managed to do, I passed this good magic on to my girls, because I think it matters.

How about you? What do you think? Are physical books gonna stick around, pages and all? Does it matter?