Several comments to the Wild Things post discuss reading aloud to kids, which of course all good-hearted parents are meant to do for the tots.
But then there comes the stage when the children achieve escape velocity and launch into reading on their own, outstripping the need or wish to have you read to them. How do you help them find their way? Do you, at all?
I know Charles and Mary Beard constructed their house in part as an ideal school-out-of-school for their children—on a farm, and so in touch with country things; close to New York; stocked with nourishing books for the kids to read at leisure. Kind of a most benevolent Skinner box.
I know too in my own youth, I was awfully fond of … let’s call it “genre fiction” to be kind. At one point my father said, no, you won’t be writing a book report on … that, and gave me David Copperfield instead. Which of course I resented in the moment and later was grateful for.
In our house we had an Encyclopedia Britannica and the complete set of Will and Ariel Durant. Which maybe explains quite a lot.
How about you? Have you tried to guide your kids’ reading? Did your parents for you?
The Edge of the American West 
92 comments
March 26, 2009 at 11:07 am
Vance
And what’s the relationship of the public library to such projects? My own childhood memories center on the weekly trip to the library rather than the home collection (though there were plenty of books there).
March 26, 2009 at 11:20 am
eric
We lived pretty far distant from the public library — had to be driven to it, unfortunately — but at a certain point I did get my own library card. Couldn’t tell you how old I was, though. I remember it as a very nice library building (this picture doesn’t do it justice) with a sizable kids’ and young adult section.
We do take our kids to the public library, but even that provides some opportunities for guidance, doesn’t it?
March 26, 2009 at 11:36 am
Lance Mannion
Both our sons love to read, but the surest way for me to kill their interest in a book is to suggest it to them. They both prefer to to explore the libraries at school and in town on their own. You’ll like this though, Eric. One day the 16 year old picked up your book, Murdering McKinley and took it upstairs to his room. He came back downstairs a little while later, disappointed. He thought it was going to be a murder mystery.
March 26, 2009 at 11:39 am
eric
Yeah, it’s pretty clear at the start that the butler did it.
March 26, 2009 at 11:40 am
Vance
No question, guidance is necessary. Now that I think about it, here’s a book my parents got for us, and which made a mark on me — I want to get it or something analogous soon.
This was our local branch, with a sort of college atmosphere. (There’s a branch in SF, where I sometimes take Rosa, with something of the same vibe — apparently it’s where Richard Brautigan did his writing.)
March 26, 2009 at 11:41 am
Standpipe Bridgeplate
In our house we had an Encyclopedia Britannica and the complete set of Will and Ariel Durant.
In our house we had an old 1956 World Book Encyclopedia, which eventually redeemed itself by serving as a primary source in a friend’s history thesis. I’m happy to say, these days my prejudices are much more current.
March 26, 2009 at 11:42 am
eric
the surest way for me to kill their interest in a book is to suggest it to them
I’ve had mixed luck here. Quite often things I loved as a kid are deemed—instantly, based on the cover alone—”too scary”. But sometimes simply buying a book and handing it off is enough to ensure that it gets devoured within a few days.
March 26, 2009 at 11:55 am
Bitchphd
I’m kind of anti-guidance, buy of course I find myself at bookstore or library suggesting things. Which has a success rate of about one in five. PK is pretty resistant to pushing.
When he was littler I would refuse to read the book based on Albert the PBS aardvaark (or whatever he’s suppses to be). And a couple weeks ago I refused to re-read Mousehunter *again* and forced him to let me try him on the first chapter of that EB White nonsense fairy tale book I forget the name of.
My deal with him is I’ll buy him any book he will read himself. (I got this idea from an essay of Sherman Alexie’s.). Books I plan to read to him are mostly of my choosing.
March 26, 2009 at 12:04 pm
Bitchphd
But he loathes bittersweet books, which I loved, so many of my favorites don’t make it.
I guess that’s where I attempt influence. By crossing my fingers and trying the Mouse and His Child, or by tentatively asking if he’s interested in Charlottes Web. The former was a success; the latter got a resounding no, which is for the best as he would have felt betrayed. I try to introduce tragedy into his reading. Because I am apparently a sadist.
March 26, 2009 at 12:08 pm
eric
Charlotte’s Web made it into the reading list here because of the movie. So, thanks Hollywood!
March 26, 2009 at 12:20 pm
Bitchphd
He won’t watch the movie, either. He’s heard it’s sad.
March 26, 2009 at 12:34 pm
spence-bob
My dad was going to force me to write a book report on Monsarrat’s The Cruel Sea as punishment for the fact that I was fucking up bigtime in 6th-grade English. I have no idea why he chose that particular book – probably because it was the oldest and mustiest volume within easy reach at the exact moment he was yelling at me about my shitty grades – but he forgot about that threat quickly enough (like he usually did).
To this day I have never read it, but looking at the plot summary on Wikipedia, it seems like something I would enjoy.
March 26, 2009 at 12:40 pm
MichaelElliott
This belongs more to the previous thread than the last one, but we have been working our way through Dahl in our house, and I’d like to recommend the new-ish paperbacks for anyone who is interested. Quentin Blake, whom I think is just brilliant, has done the illustrations — and there are enough of them to hold my four-year-old’s interest.
March 26, 2009 at 12:45 pm
eric
Monsarrat’s The Cruel Sea
You remind me of another paternal recommendation which turned out to be pretty good: The Bounty Trilogy.
Michael, don’t you think Oates is kind of right about Dahl?
March 26, 2009 at 1:33 pm
sero
These may be a bit out of the referent age range, but my great aunt gave me Johnny Tremain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and (after reading it herself) Sign of the Beaver when I was a child. All three made a last impact on me, along with Charlotte’s Web, the Westing Game, and Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of Nimh. I work now and then at a bookstore managed by my cousin, and continue to recommend these excellent novels.
March 26, 2009 at 1:43 pm
eric
My son loved Johnny Tremain. I’m not sure he’s ready for Huck Finn, though.
March 26, 2009 at 2:07 pm
dana
I don’t remember anyone reading to me as a kid. No bedtime stories, certainly no chapter books. Different parenting styles, I guess; we had learn-to-read books, and a set of encyclopedias, and a collection of how-to-parent and how-to-treat-common-illnesses books. And I could sometimes buy books at school when we had a book fair, but mostly I relied on the school library.
And read the parenting books. I was studying the enemy.
March 26, 2009 at 2:10 pm
kid bitzer
i’m kind of surprised at how much good children’s literature keeps being written.
old stuff that i think is good: e. nesbit is a genius, and all of her stuff is brilliant. edward eager stole all his stuff from her and admits it; c.s. lewis swiped a lot and admitted a little.
elizabeth enright did a lot of good stuff: thimble summer, the melendy quartet, the gone-aways.
more recently, i think the “exiles” trilogy by hilary mckay is astoundingly good, and gut-bustingly funny. everything that maira kalman does.
and then of course rowling. the sociological phenomenon has lost steam, but i think that the books will continue being worth reading for a while.
March 26, 2009 at 2:16 pm
Kieran
I was awfully fond of … let’s call it “genre fiction” to be kind.
It’s OK, you can say “Playboy”.
March 26, 2009 at 2:16 pm
Tybalt
Heck, I still don’t read books I know are going to be sad. At least, not fiction. Since I read 90% non-fiction, I get enough sad.
With Elder, who’s almost six now, he directs his own reading very forcefully and you can’t shift him too much. He still likes to take on new and different books when I read them to Younger, who having just turned three is blessedly easy to engage. (“You want to hear this really cool book about a panda/a funny cat/a cheeky monkey/a purple crayon?” “YEAH!!”)
Elder (who is Aspie) has taken up some entirely unexpected books thanks to this method of just being around when I am reading to Younger, things I never thought would catch him.
My own parents never tried to guide my reading. They did struggle to keep up with it… we were lower-middle-class if that and lived out in the country – bought books were a luxury and the library was a long drive away – and I could read five new books in a day easily. My mother still loves to tell the story of a family vacation taken in the camper-trailer when I was four; she couldn’t find me one afternoon and then came across me, starved for reading, sitting inside on the floor having pulled EVERY can and box of food out of the pantry and fridge, reading the labels. But they did absolutely everything they could to load me down with books.
March 26, 2009 at 2:43 pm
grackle
My folks read to us ( several siblings) almost from infancy.
My father read to us until well after we could read to ourselves. We had the World Book and the Brittanica encyclopedias and the house was always full of books. Early on, we had a copy of the six volume version of Olive Beaupre Miller’s My Book House (which is graduated in difficulty). We were read Lewis Carroll, C.S. Lewis, Kenneth Grahame, and much more. We made trips to the library once or twice a week, depending only on whether one or more people had finished reading what they had checked out. When I was 10 or 11 my father suggested that I might enjoy James Oliver Curwood, which I found completely engrossing.
With my own kids, we also read to them until they were happier reading on their own. I agree on the E. Nesbit and my kids adored all of the Dr. Dolittle books, and loved the Susan Cooper books, about the first of which a completely wretched movie was made. They also liked the Madeleine L’Engle Wrinkle in Time books. When I was in grade school in the 50’s, television was still less than ubiquitous. For those whose children have open access to TV, I think instilling a love of reading could be a more difficult proposition, to say nothing of video games and internet related competition.
March 26, 2009 at 2:54 pm
touhy
The whole Wizard of OZ series–there are dozens. Our public library had the original run, from the 1920’s by the look of them. This is why I’m a sucker for Gregory MacGuire (Wicked, etc.) today.
March 26, 2009 at 2:57 pm
eric
I loved the Oz books when I was a kid, and my son likes them too. I couldn’t really abide Wicked, though I tried.
March 26, 2009 at 3:34 pm
'stina
I’m a lurker, but this something close to my heart, so I thought I’d comment. I wrote a post about my mom’s methods a few months ago. She and I have very similar reading tastes, and she still drops by with books all the time.
At any rate, my parents generally encouraged reading by having as many books as possible around the house. Birthday presents, Christmas presents, every time the Scholastic order form got passed around in school, ordering various Time/Life series, encouraging the Junior Great Books program, occassional trips to the bookstore just because. I don’t recall her pushing particular series or books on me, though I suspect I would not have read the Laura Ingels Wilder books or the Lousia May Alcott books without her influence.
March 26, 2009 at 3:43 pm
ari
What will it mean when, instead of a house full of books, there are just a few Kindles strewn about? I’m actually going to post something about this (at least sort of about this) subject later. I just thought I’d whet your appetite.
March 26, 2009 at 3:48 pm
chingona
The book that got me reading by myself was Johnny Tremain. I remember being six, seven, eight – in that range – and my mother reading us chapter books one chapter at a time. I think we read several Little House on the Prairie Books like that and probably a few other things. With Johnny Tremain, there were several times the chapter ended on some suspenseful note. I would be unable to sleep, and I would sneak out of bed with a flashlight and start reading the next chapter by myself.
I, too, had the weekly trip to the library. I think I was pretty free to pick what I wanted. I liked the bittersweet stories (Where the Red Fern Grows). And I liked fantasy stuff set in medieval-y type settings, like the Black Cauldron series and there was another one set in modern day Wales about the return of King Arthur, except it wasn’t obvious at first and comes out in bits. I remember very little guidance (my brother used to pick his books based on how the bindings smelled), which resulted in me reading some books when I was too young for them, once I was old enough to get myself to the library and wander out of the children’s section. (I think I was 14 when I read Portnoy’s Complaint.)
My son is just three, so we’re still reading the little kid books together, but I’ve already bought Watership Down with great hopes of us reading it together. It’s pretty scary and sad, though, so we’ll see.
March 26, 2009 at 4:19 pm
bitchphd
Oh yeah, Where the Red Fern Grows. Totally. I liked the Black Cauldron series too, and so did PK like the first one, but Eilonwy’s smartassery towards Taran frustrated him and he wouldn’t let me read the second (he may have gotten old enough for it now, though. Dunno).
I did give him Watership Down many years ago, which he enjoyed (we skipped some of the descriptive passages). He was young enough that we read Hazel’s death as a literal visitation by Elhrairrah, though, and I think I skipped the sentence about the body. He liked the picture book The Story of Jumping Mouse the first time, too. But then he got older and realized that metaphorical deaths are still deaths, and nope. I don’t think we’ll be trying Watership Down again soon.
March 26, 2009 at 4:25 pm
Colin
If the Kindle could mimic the experience of sitting in front of a shelf of books and choosing, it might be fine. Having a lot of attractive reading options was the one of the pleasures I remember as a child, which is why I resisted advice — I shunned Mark Twain because he was every adult’s idea of what a child should read. Like Eric I read tons of genre fiction — the complete Freddie the Pig, and anything with a military theme, I mean anything as in _The Story of the Seabees_. OTOH I read some good stuff because I found it before anyone could tell me it was good e.g. _Robinson Crusoe_ and _The Red Badge of Courage_, which stood up well as adventure stories.
I still like to cruise other people’s books, a pleasure the Kindle will deny us. Some years ago I visited the house where Trotsky was killed, which was depressing except for the chance to check out the books in his study.
March 26, 2009 at 4:32 pm
Michael Elliott
Eric: I do think Oates makes sense on Dahl, but I also haven’t really read enough to judge. I actually never read him as a child, and so this is all my first experience. We’ve done James and Fantastic Mr. Fox, but my wife somehow nabbed Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. As Dahl would say: pesky spouses.
March 26, 2009 at 4:33 pm
eric
I think Charlie and James and the Giant Peach are the least … problematic, let’s say.
March 26, 2009 at 4:58 pm
LizardBreath
Both our sons love to read, but the surest way for me to kill their interest in a book is to suggest it to them.
This is the most frustrating part of parenting for me. I’m very fond of children’s books, and when I had kids I wallowed in the idea of giving them all my favorite books. Doesn’t work at all. They mostly read stuff they get from the school library. Odd things take off here and there, but I’ve managed to kill any possible interest in either E. Nesbit or Lloyd Alexander by offering them too enthusiastically.
Blasted children.
March 26, 2009 at 5:01 pm
chingona
I also really liked those John Bellairs spooky mystery books with the Edward Gorey covers.
March 26, 2009 at 5:04 pm
bitchphd
You and I obviously read all the same things. PK really likes the Bellairs books, too.
March 26, 2009 at 5:06 pm
kid bitzer
you know, on, if your kids don’t like e. nesbit, you could always just get new kids.
March 26, 2009 at 5:08 pm
kid bitzer
“on” in that last was “lb” until the damned iphone corrected it.
March 26, 2009 at 5:14 pm
eric
You must master your iPhone, kid, lest it master you.
March 26, 2009 at 5:24 pm
kid bitzer
it has.
and of the many masters i have had and still have, it is one of the more benevolent.
still, this auto-correction crap has got to go.
March 26, 2009 at 5:30 pm
LizardBreath
I’ve considered it. Actually, about a year ago I just tried to stop recommending stuff. They’re both always reading, and I figure I just have to allow them to pick what they like. Drat the little devils.
March 26, 2009 at 5:49 pm
bitchphd
I’ve grown reliant on the auto correction, but sometimes it screws shit up.
PK doesn’t like Nesbit either. I have to confess I wasn’t sucked in by the beginning of “Five Children and It” myself, and we abandoned it.
March 26, 2009 at 5:55 pm
kid bitzer
fc&i is good, but i actually prefer the non-magical “treasure-seekers” trilogy.
among the magical ones, possibly castle of arden & hardings luck.
do any children still read phantom tollbooth? and at what ages can kids read douglas adams? eoin colfer?
March 26, 2009 at 6:00 pm
bitchphd
PK freaking ADORED The Phantom Tollbooth. I think it is probably his favorite of all the books I’ve read him in the last few years.
March 26, 2009 at 6:00 pm
LizardBreath
Mine actually did like The Phantom Tollbooth. Which they’d blasted well better have, given that I painted the map on a wall at my college co-op.
March 26, 2009 at 6:03 pm
kid bitzer
for littler kids, i ran into a picture-book series about a decade ago that knocked me out: tim wynne-jones’ “zoom” series, about a sea-faring cat. beautiful drawings (by different artists in different numbers). extraordinary dialogue. luscious subplots and undercurrents.
March 26, 2009 at 6:04 pm
Kieran
What will it mean when, instead of a house full of books, there are just a few Kindles strewn about?
Kindles do furnish a room.
March 26, 2009 at 6:04 pm
kid bitzer
good–then perhaps you will not have to send them back after all. if they enjoyed ph-tb, they might also enjoy pogo comics. don’t ask me why–those two just tend to track.
March 26, 2009 at 6:05 pm
LizardBreath
Hrm. They do know the words to “Deck the halls with Boston Charlie”, although they don’t know there’s an associated comic.
March 26, 2009 at 6:09 pm
kid bitzer
i don’t know why i’m pretending to run a recommender algorithm. i don’t know nothing.
the other day i went to amazon, and it told me i would like the twilight series. i was deeply insulted. i still haven’t been able to figure out what i did to deserve that.
March 26, 2009 at 6:09 pm
bitchphd
I might have to introduce PK to Pogo, come to think of it.
March 26, 2009 at 6:13 pm
teofilo
Interesting topic. My parents read to me and my sister when we were very young, but I at least grew out of it pretty quickly. We always had tons of books in the house, with various walls completely covered in bookshelves. I started off reading on my own with some of my mom’s old books from her childhood, including the Landmark books and some of the children’s-book editions of things like Robinson Crusoe. When I got a little older I gradually shifted to a more exclusive focus on nonfiction that has continued ever since. I was mainly interested in ancient history and related subjects, including Greek mythology (the D’Aulaires and Edith Hamilton were particular favorites). I scoured the books in the house for that sort of thing; my dad’s specialty was modern European history, so ancient history was a rather small proportion of the books on the shelves, but there were still quite a few. Similarly, there wasn’t a whole lot of ancient history at my elementary school’s library, but I checked out whatever I could find, often several times. The public library wasn’t really that great in general, and there wasn’t a branch very close to our house, but the one we went to most often (Erna Fergusson, for those who know Albuquerque) had a pretty good selection of children’s nonfiction. For the more serious stuff I was into later I had to go to the main library downtown, which still didn’t have the best selection but was the only real option for subjects that weren’t available at either the branch libraries or our house. I remember checking out the same book on Polynesian archaeology three or four times and failing to get past the first half chapter or so each time.
March 26, 2009 at 6:23 pm
Bloix
Since we seem to be back to recommendations:
The Indian in the Cupboard series, by Lynne Reid Banks, is very good for pre-teen readers, say 9 to 12.
As are the David Almond books, particularly Skellig.
As for guidance -my parents never did much of that. My father did read to me at bedtime for years after I’d learned to read for myself – real literature, like Robinson Crusoe, but also dreck, like Edgar Rice Burrough’s Martian stories.
When my grandmother moved out of her house, my father brought home a big box of books he’d read as a boy – mostly truly dreadful series books from the ’20’s: Tom Swift, Dave Dashaway, Bomba the Jungle Boy. I read them all.
March 26, 2009 at 6:24 pm
teofilo
I did read The Phantom Tollbooth, mostly on my mom’s recommendation, but I don’t remember a thing about it. I read everything of Douglas Adams’s I could find when I was around 12. Same with Jean Auel, come to think of it, around the same time.
And of course Pogo. We only had a few Pogo books around the house, but I read and reread them frequently. I was quite fond of comic-strip collections in general, actually, and we had a lot of them.
March 26, 2009 at 6:26 pm
teofilo
Ooh, and the Indian in the Cupboard books. Those were great.
March 26, 2009 at 6:29 pm
kid bitzer
teo, i’m impressed with your interest in non-fiction. i never could stomach that stuff as a kid.
still can’t, really, even though i have to for work. but that’s what it is: work.
clearly you’re made of sterner stuff.
which raises a related question: is there any poetry that it’s worth trying on kids?
(aside from dr. seuss, of course).
March 26, 2009 at 6:33 pm
JP Stormcrow
For poetry we had and enjoyed John Ciardi’s Man Who Sang the Sillies.
March 26, 2009 at 6:38 pm
eric
There is, of course, Shel Silverstein.
March 26, 2009 at 6:38 pm
eric
And my little girl likes an Edward Lear reader she has, with “The Pelican Chorus” and “The Owl and the Pussycat” in it.
March 26, 2009 at 6:43 pm
kid bitzer
don’t get me started on that guy silverstein.
actually, i remember an old unfogged thread in which someone described watching an interpretive mime of ‘the giving tree’ which had me laughing pretty hard, esp. when it was said that the boy
‘went all dahmer on’ the tree.
silverstein–what a sick jerk.
March 26, 2009 at 6:45 pm
eric
Yes, but some of Sidewalk Ends is pretty funny.
March 26, 2009 at 6:52 pm
kid bitzer
what, so nobody reads their kids swinburne anymore?
louis macniece?
(“daddy, what’s blavatsky?”)
March 26, 2009 at 6:56 pm
JP Stormcrow
Until I had kids, I had only known Silverstein from music like “Freakin’ at the Freaker’s Ball”, so I was bit dubious that the children’s stuff was even by the same guy.
Also for poetry, really liked Milne’s collections from an early age. We happened to have about 3 copies of each of Milne’s volumes of Pooh stories and poetry that we had in different places around the house for the kids to “find”.
March 26, 2009 at 7:11 pm
Jason B.
Every child should read Bukowski.
March 26, 2009 at 7:20 pm
teofilo
Ogden Nash is good.
March 26, 2009 at 7:26 pm
Bloix
“is there any poetry that it’s worth trying on kids?”
I once read a chapter of Vikram Seth’s book of parables in verse, Beastly Tales, to a classroom of eight-year olds and it held their attention.
Robert Louis Stevenson’s “A Child’s Garden of Verses” really does have some good things in it. Seriously.
And for very young children, I would try the two Milne books – “When We Were Very Young” and “Now We Are Six.” Here’s one that my children liked:
I met a Man as I went walking:
We got talking,
Man and I.
“Where are you going to, Man?” I said
(I said to the Man as he went by).
“Down to the village, to get some bread.
Will you come with me?” “No, not I.”
I met a horse as I went walking;
We got talking,
Horse and I.
“Where are you going to, Horse, today?”
(I said to the Horse as he went by).
“Down to the village to get some hay.
Will you come with me?” “No, not I.”
I met a Woman as I went walking;
We got talking,
Woman and I.
“Where are you going to, Woman, so early?”
(I said to the Woman as she went by).
“Down to the village to get some barley.
Will you come with me?” “No, not I.”
I met some Rabbits as I went walking;
We got talking,
Rabbits and I.
“Where are you going in your brown fur coats?”
(I said to the Rabbits as they went by).
“Down to the village to get some oats.
Will you come with us?” “No, not I.”
I met a Puppy as I went walking;
We got talking,
Puppy and I.
“Where are you going this nice fine day?”
(I said to the Puppy as he went by).
“Up to the hills to roll and play.”
“I’ll come with you, Puppy,” said I.
March 26, 2009 at 8:19 pm
andrew
I don’t think I ever read “The Giving Tree” or if I did it never made an impression on me. I loved both Where the Sidewalk Ends and A Light in the Attic.
March 26, 2009 at 8:20 pm
BP in MN
When I was, oh, 9 or 10, after I’d discovered and devoured Tolkien and had moved on to all sorts of other fantasy of often dubious literary value, my mom tried to get me to expand my reading horizons. The two books she checked out and set aside for me? Crime and Punishment and Ulysses. I did not get very far.
In general, my childhood reading was shaped by a combination of the very nice woman at our late, lamented independent bookstore (Ruminator books né Hungry Mind) and by whatever hand-me-down books my sister and I ended up with from our older friends.
Like teofilo, I remember the Indian in the Cupboard books very fondly, as well as Roald Dahl. Lloyd Alexander’s Chronicles of Prydain and Le Guin’s Earthsea books were also fantastic.
I also had a soft spot for the Great Brain books and other books with settings that differed markedly from 1980s Twin Cities. But frankly I was a pretty undiscriminating reader; some of the stuff I loved then was truly awful when I tried to revisit it later.
March 26, 2009 at 8:23 pm
'stina
I used to read a lot of poetry in Cricket magazine, which is a literary magazine for children that (much to my delight) is still published. It had lovely drawings on the front cover, and it chock full of short stories, poems, drawings, and sometimes games. I threw most of my copies away at some “gah! I need bookshelf space” moment in my late teens (not realizing that this would become a lifelong problem), though I still have the first issue I ever got somewhere. It was pretty cool to have something delivered to me every few months.
My copies of Where the Sidewalk Ends, The Missing Piece, and A Light in the Attic were very well loved. My mom has those with all of the other kids books, waiting for the day that she has grandkids to read them too. For whatever reason I never associated The Giving Tree with the other books.
March 26, 2009 at 8:57 pm
JPool
Both my parents read to me. Milne and Astrid Lindgren’s Emil books were among the favorites, but it was a little bit of everything. I remember learning to read swapping chapters of Mary Poppins with my mom — her reading one and then me tortuously sounding out the next. We had some books around the house, but mostly we got things from the library, which meant that I got to be excited about picking out new books. They didn’t try and steer us to quality so much as expose us to a bunch of things. I know the my mom was thrilled when I finally got around to reading The Hobbit, but I think in general she tried not to psh things on me.
In other culture areas too I think they mostly tried to encourage enthusiasm. My parents’ musical taste was, um, highly uneven, but the fact that my dad would whistle or sing to himself and to us helped me to love music. Similarly, I don’t remember much poetry beyond Milne, but Dad would recite Frost or “The Jabberwocky” when he felt so inspired and it felt like a fabulous magic trick.
March 26, 2009 at 9:00 pm
Bitchphd
Poetry for children and no one’s mentioned Calef Brown yet??!?
March 26, 2009 at 9:05 pm
JPool
And small internet that it is, it seems that BP and I grew up in the same neighborhood in St. Paul.
March 26, 2009 at 9:24 pm
Megan
He didn’t recommend them to me, but I read all the Freddy the Pig books because I knew my Dad read them when he was a kid.
I remember the Tuesday night ritual very well. Dinner (pork chops and broccoli) and a trip to the library, where I could check out thirty books every week. I don’t remember my mom or dad directing my reading. I don’t remember them monitoring it either. I remember them accommodating it, and withholding it as the last rung of punishment.
March 26, 2009 at 10:47 pm
Mr. Sidetable
I’m glad to see the Great Brain books mentioned (and by a fellow Minnesota native, no less, although from the other side of the river). They made me very curious about Utah. Oh, and Mormons.
My parents were quite cheap, so our family never, ever flew anywhere, which resulted in very long car trips to visit grandparents in Florida. But one benefit was that on these trips we read books out loud to each other–we all took turns reading for a while, and got through all the Narnia and Lord of the Rings books that way.
Having no children of my own to torment, the one book that I have on several occasions given copies of to children of friends and relatives is “From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler.” It made me really like museums.
Beyond that, my parents didn’t do a lot of directing. I read pretty much whatever was around (1964 edition of Britannica, a rather lengthy fixation on the Civil War). I don’t ever remember being told that I shouldn’t/wasn’t ready to read anything.
March 27, 2009 at 12:07 am
Gennis
I read Little House in the Big Woods to my son last summer because his school wanted the kids to read a book over the summer (or be read to, as appropriate). He didn’t like the idea at all, but I told him it was for school so we’d just keep reading a chapter every few mornings. About half way through, he started enjoying it and after that we read through the entire series, twice.
The Little House books worked, but The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe isn’t going so well. We’re reading it now because his class is going to see the play next month. I finally had to say that we were going to read it as part of schoolwork, with him reading some aloud, just so he’d know the story, because all my suggestions that we read it for fun were rejected. He keeps saying he doesn’t like it, that it’s too scary. I had to tell him how it turns out in order to get him to continue reading.
I can’t get him to choose another chapter book on his own. It’s as if he’s afraid of trying new books, but only the chapter books. He picks up various types of other books, from picture books to beginning readers to science and history books. He’s enjoyed half a dozen of the “If you…” history books as school or bedtime reading. His school’s very history-oriented, which probably helps explain that (but doesn’t entirely cover why I’ve lately been treated to stories about what happened when Luke Skywalker met Lewis and Clark).
Poetry – we’ve probably listened to the CD from Poetry Speaks to Children half a dozen times in the car.
March 27, 2009 at 6:10 am
kid bitzer
by the way, eric, were you inspired to start this thread by reading that ct post about “which topics get monster comment threads?”?
’cause if your intention was just to gin up a 100+ comment thread, then may i suggest you ask people to name their favorite children’s book about israel and palestine?
March 27, 2009 at 6:13 am
JJO
I find they really enjoy Marc Bloch and Peter Novick. Oh, wait … wrong thread.
My kids aren’t at the reading to themselves phase yet, but the oldest (5) is on the cusp. She does sometimes have a negative reaction to being pushed towards something, but if we present something to her and then just let it lie until she asks us to read it to her, she can be very enthusiastic. She has really enjoyed the Freddy the Pig books, which I loved as a kid, and the All of a Kind Family series, which I had no idea about but were among my wife’s favorites. Jack Prelutsky has also gone over very well — she can memorize the short ones after just a couple of readings. We did the first Harry Potter, and she liked it, but a lot of it went over her head and the subsequent books just get scarier (which really bothers her), so we may wait another couple of years before doing those.
March 27, 2009 at 6:40 am
kid bitzer
i do not make a habit of agreeing with gore vidal, and in fact i do not recall having done it before, but i agree with nearly every word of this:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/13132
adding to it only that, when read side by side, it is clear that lewis stole jadis, the queen of charn, from the babylonian queen in amulet; and that norton stole a major plot device in ‘bedknob & broomstick’ from harding’s luck.
March 27, 2009 at 7:13 am
docdave
My oldest and only is 7 and reads pretty well, although she prefers to be read to at bedtime. Her faves?
1. the Oz novels. Not just “WWoO,” but all of ’em. Two chapters per night, with time for “footnotes.” She is quite fond of Scraps, the Patchwork Girl.
2. E. Nesbit. the Railway Children, Enchanted Castle, Five Children and It, The Book of Dragons.
3. Junie B. Jones–don’t laugh, they’re some of the best “oral interp” opportunities written in a long time.
4. “Barbie” storybooks, re-configured on the fly into narratives less namby-pamby, characters less ickily Aryan. It’s too much work for what one can accomplish, though, and she’s beginning to suspect that what she hears from me is Not Exactly What’s On the Page.
5. A rotating shelf-full of discarded children’s books bought cheap at library book sales over the years. I don’t worry about the lead-based inks scare; we’ve taught our girl to consume neither plaster nor paper. Great stuff from Rosemary Wells, Margaret Wise Brown, Edward Ardizzone.
6. and speaking of Ardizzone: the Little Tim series and, particularly, Sarah and Simon And No Red Paint.
And, to my delight, she’s discovering our old reserves of National Geographic, American Heritage, American Heritage Junior Library and Horizon Caravel books. She found my name, writ “large and childish” in some of the last two, and asked me how old I was when I read them. When I told her “six,” she wrinkled her brow and resolved to get to work on ’em.
An oh yes, she got her library card on her fourth birthday. Dangerous young woman, this.
March 27, 2009 at 7:59 am
'stina
I adored the James Howe Bunnicula books. I’ve reread them several times as an adult and I still find them hysterical. Chester the cat may be one of my favorite characters in all of literature.
Cautionary tale about encouraging your kids to read :()) My little* sister got the Wayside School books, by Louis Schar, when she was seven or eight years old. It’s a series of stories about the kids who go to this unusual school. One of the books, Wayside School is Falling Down tells the story of Calvin, whose parents decide to let him get a tattoo, because he kept on losing or breaking his toys. He solicited his classmates for ideas on what sort of tattoo to get, and they offer all sorts of cool suggestions. To the amazement of his classmates, he shows up at school with a potato tattooed to his ankle. He explains that he likes potatoes. And he’s pretty sure he will always like potatoes. Anchors and mermaids and all that other stuff may be sort of cool, but he doens’t like them as much.
Fast forward 15ish years or so, and my sister take a russet potato into a tattoo shop. It’s on her bicep instead of her ankle, but it’s pretty cool.
*Little=younger than me. She’s now thirty.
March 27, 2009 at 8:44 am
E Dolinger
Lois Lowry, Katherine Patterson are good. A recommendation for older children is the Brian Jacques “Redwall” series, and our all-time favorite Phillip Pullman. The latter wrote “The Golden Compass” trilogy, and a series “Ruby in the Smoke”.
March 27, 2009 at 9:46 am
Bloix
Gennis- Having read them as a child, I read the Little House series to my children, and I was struck at how bleak they were. Not only The Long Winter, which is catastrophic, but all of them – a chronicle of failure, repeated over and over across the Plains. Other than Big Woods, the one book that’s not a record of deprivation is Farmer Boy, the story of Almanzo’s boyhood in well-settled upstate New York – and in that one, the obsessive detail that’s given to the hearty farmhouse meals could only have been written by someone who had strong memories of childhood hunger.
And Laura is almost never able to express what she feels about her life. She represses herself constantly. Even as an adult author, she expresses emotion indirectly by describing the physical world – a dress, a hat – rather than by allowing herself to say what she feels. It’s an arid landscape that’s portrayed in those books.
March 27, 2009 at 11:22 am
kid bitzer
agreed. laura’s pa is a loser who can’t settle down or make a going concern of any one place. he strip-mines a bit of value from a piece of land, then leaves it behind.
he also returns from a long winter absence with a cock and bull story about living in a snow cave for weeks. sounds a lot like he took the kids’ money and drunk it up.
the entire children’s book industry enables his alcoholism, if you ask me.
March 27, 2009 at 11:35 am
Carl
Watership Down is the first book I snuck into my parents’ bedroom and read ahead because I couldn’t stand the suspense.
Once I was weaned from being read to, we had a lot of books around and I grazed. The Hardy Boys, lots of pulpy gruesome pirate tales and life-of-the-sea stuff. Pogo for sure, and John Lennon. Narnia. Interesting story there: a colleague who studied Lewis gave a paper in which he took for granted that the Christ symbolism in those was obvious. I had to set him straight. Having been raised a heathen, it had never occurred to me in two readings of the whole series. But I’m a little slow.
March 27, 2009 at 1:15 pm
JPool
Yeah, the Christian symbolism in Narnia was entirely lost on me too (though I was a bit concerned at seven or eight at what seemed to me like racism in The Horse and his Boy) until I got to The Last Battle, where even UU raised me thought “Wait a minute…”
March 27, 2009 at 1:52 pm
Bloix
“he strip-mines a bit of value from a piece of land, then leaves it behind.”
He does, actually. In one of the books – when they’re in Oklahoma territory, I think – Laura notes after they’ve lived there a while – a year? – that the game is all gone and the pond is fished out, and pa has to travel farther and farther in order to shoot something for them to eat.
March 27, 2009 at 2:15 pm
Carl
And the thing was, I thought the sacrifice motif was just a dumb plot point. I just couldn’t see the sense of it, it seemed really contrived, but because there was so much other cool stuff going on I just went with the flow.
March 27, 2009 at 3:59 pm
Charlieford
When I was six, I saw the film (Gregory Peck version) of Moby-Dick. It blew me away. I turned to my dad and said, “Is that a book?” He said “I think so.” (My father’s education had terminated at the 8th grade–because of the depression, he had to drop out of school and go to work.) So, next weekend, he and I were in a little mom-and-pop bookstore in downtown Trenton. My father and the owner were bent over a hard-bound copy of Moby-Dick. They turned the pages. They weighed its heft. They looked at me. They looked at each other. Simultaneously, they shook their heads. My dad could see I was crushed, near tears. He didn’t say anything, just wandered about the store, found a book, called me over, and said, “What about this? Monsters!” It was a large, nicely illustrated book on dinosaurs. I was ecstatic. Soon I had read it and every book in the library on dinosaurs, and struggling with those Latin names gave me all kinds of mad skills in the reading department. I even went on a Nazi-kick when I was in 5th or 6th grade, and read William Shirer’s RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH, which, by the way, with it’s vivid portrayals of medical experiments in the camps, doesn’t really belong in an elementary school library. But oh well. It definitely got me prepared for the world-as-it-is.
March 27, 2009 at 6:18 pm
alwsdad
My 8-year-old son has been enjoying the Madeline L’Engle books, despite my having told him they were personal favorites of mine at his age. (That’s usually the Kiss of Indifference). i do most of the reading but he’ll do a paragraph here and there for me. For a while he liked the Boxcar Children which bored me to tears.
My 4 year old daughter recently discovered my collections of Nancy cartoons and she loves them. When she eats a sandwich now, she tells me she’s having a ‘Jam Session’.
March 27, 2009 at 7:38 pm
teofilo
I, too, totally missed the allegory in the Narnia books. The Last Battle mostly just confused the hell out of me.
March 28, 2009 at 10:19 am
fromlaurelstreet
Robert Louis Stevenson’s “A Child’s Garden of Verses” and Howard R. Garis’ “Mr. Wiggly” books are among my earliest self-reading memories.
Madeline L’Engle’s “A Wrinkle In Time” was my introduction to the idea that kids could have agency. I loved that book.
It’s funny to hear people describe reading Douglas Adams when they were small children.
As for Bukowski — why not? My father gave me “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolff” to read when I was in the sixth grade.
March 28, 2009 at 10:20 am
fromlaurelstreet
And Gurdjieff.
March 28, 2009 at 10:52 am
fromlaurelstreet
and of course, that should be “Uncle Wiggly” …
March 30, 2009 at 12:49 am
dance
Mrs Piggle-Wiggle!
March 31, 2009 at 7:29 am
Steve C.
Eric – for years my 9-year-old daughter has been a huge fan of the TV show that your, uhhh, “genre fiction” was adapted from. I haven’t yet told her that the books exist, for obvious reasons. On the other hand, last summer we read Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn together, and that was without me pushing them on her … so I think the two tastes can safely coexist.
Last night she pulled my old copy of The Odyssey down from the shelf (the same one I used in Mrs. Russell’s class – remember her?) – but she didn’t make it very far. She was excited by my description of the story, but just wasn’t ready for the language. Now I’m looking for an age-appropriate adaptation.
(BTW, I’m enjoying the blog. We should catch up sometime!)