Celebrate your child's love of learning

© Wondertime

Dad on a Lark

You know how sometimes, before your child is born, or when she's still a tiny infant, you and your spouse raise these hypothetical questions about how she'll turn out? What if she hates sports? What if she's uninterested in school? You reassure yourself that everything will be fine, you'll love her no matter what she does or doesn't like.

But what if she doesn't like to read?

Of the things Molly and I hope to transmit to Larkin, a love of books is high on the list. I've made my career reading and writing; Molly is an English teacher. As children we both read — a lot. I have an all-time favorite photo of Molly, a snapshot taken when she was a girl of about 9, off on a summer trip with her family; she is sitting in a little niche in the rocks, her head buried in a novel. As for me, I'm a greedy book collector. In our house, wall space is bookshelf space. It's ridiculous, really. We have bookshelves in every room except bathrooms and the dining room. We even have them on the landing.

I saw a TV news report the other day about a teacher using iPods in class, hoping to foster a more welcoming learning environment. "The kids think of school as a place where they have to power down," she lamented. I understand the impulse, and I expect Larkin to be plugged in and powered up like any other American, both in school and at home. But to me, reading will always be about books — the physical book itself, and what happens when you hold it in your hand, and mere marks on a page conjure up images and sounds inside your head. The magic of reading, as writer William H. Gass once noted, is that when we do it, "thought seems to grow a body." I think this is especially true for a child. A child's imagination is an active creature, and books give it a place to stretch and roam. We want Larkin to know this place and be at home there.

Do parents somehow communicate their obsessions to their newborns? Already as a baby, just 2 months old, Larkin showed a strange fascination for the bookshelves in the den. Staring at them seemed to calm her. "Look at the books!" we'd say when she was upset; we'd actually hold her up in front of the shelves, and she'd stop wailing. Later, as soon as she could manage the movements, she began to play at reading, sitting with a book on her lap and solemnly turning the pages. It's funny to realize that even before reading comes joy in the book itself — as if one learned to cook by falling in love with frying pans.

With Larkin, looking at books soon progressed to scattering them on the floor and reshelving them, over and over, like some tiny librarian on steroids. By her first birthday she knew which book was which; she could barely walk, but send her off looking for Brown Bear, Brown Bear, and she'd come back with it. Certain books on Molly's and my bookshelves also mesmerized her, mysteriously. Why, for instance, did she always head straight for film critic Chris Fujiwara's book on director Jacques Tourneur — a big hardcover she could barely lift — and haul it off the shelf? Because it was bright blue?

Nowadays, just turned 2, Larkin is a full-blown book fiend. She has a big library of favorites, from Go, Dog. Go! to Kiss Goodnight to What's Wrong, Little Pookie? — books she demands we read to her first thing in the morning, and before and after her nap, and at bedtime ... and a lot of times in between, too. She'll grab one and toddle over and toss it on my lap, then launch herself after it. "Read dis, Dada!" is the brusque command. "Read book!" "Another book!" "Again!" She's actually kind of a bibliotyrant. I'm guessing Molly and I read her about 15 books a day. We have to laugh at ourselves sometimes. Enough with the books, already! I have filed Larkin's book mania away under "Watch out what you wish for; it may be more than you bargained for."

But I don't mind — especially these days, when the computer rules our culture, and the book is starting to look like outmoded equipment. Amazon has just developed a digital book, called Kindle, which allows you to search, link, comment, discuss, and order related products while you read a novel: to be, in a word, "interactive." Some see this as a way to save reading by updating it. I wonder if it will actually help hasten the end of reading. At least the kind of reading I'm talking about, in which the book is a sanctuary where you're alone with your thoughts and those of that other, invisible person, the writer. What one does with a computer bears little resemblance to the way a traditional reader works through a book, steadily piling up pages on the left as they diminish on the right. In this kind of reading, your body is quiet, but your mind circles and climbs and leaps. You're a little girl of 9 sitting among the rocks, lost in another world.

Larkin was born in the age of the blog and the Blackberry. But I hope she'll grow up to be a holdout. Yesterday I was driving through town with her in the back seat, and she was so quiet, I assumed she'd fallen asleep. I looked back in the mirror, and there she was, an oversized Clifford the Big Red Dog book open in her lap. She was lost in it. "Sweetie," I said, "What are you doing?"

"Reading," she said. And without so much as a glance up, she quietly turned the page.

Editor's Note:
You can also read Rand's blog on Family.com, a sister site to Wondertime.com where you can post comments and connect with other Rand fans, and Rand will be able to be part of the conversation as well.