For the love of reading

I remember when I used to trawl the baby stores late at nights when I was pregnant with Chip. Set next to the baby bibs and developmental toys that promised to turn wee babies into geniuses, there were shelves upon shelves of CDs. Baby Mozart, Baby Bach and Baby any-composer-you-can-think-of. I must admit I was tempted to pick one of those CDs, only to be admonished by a little voice inside that said, “Stop! What, are you doing, you utter idiot? Did Bach sit into wee hours of morning to compose music for teensy babies?” Of course he didn’t. The Bach and Mozart (and Pink Floyd and Deep Purple) CDs at home would do just fine, right? And they did. But, I think, what worked more, was that our love of music rubbed off on Chip. Music surrounds us and surrounds Chip too and he has learnt to work the iphone to play the songs he likes and on many idle Saturday afternoons, he lies on the sofa in the gentle sun and hums his favorites.

I have often wondered of music-less parents who invest their dollars in buying baby music. Do they end up with music loving children? Unless the children listen and learn to appreciate good music not just into their toddler years but way, I mean way beyond, I don’t think music listened to as babies would help much.

What does this have to do with reading, you ask? Well, plenty.

In the United States at least, there is a cultish drive to get kids to read. As early as possible. In baby hood, if you can. A child who does not read in Kindergarten is well, someone who will grow up shunning books. Four years of parenting and I laugh at this. As a child, I learnt to read late. Sure, I could read words and simple sentences by the time I was five or six, but I did not read independently until I was eight. I remember the first book I read. It was an abridged version of the Three Musketeers. The story was intriguing, as was D’Artgnan’s yellow horse and Lady DeWinter. It was the first time, I remember the power of books – how they could take me to another time and place and I was enchanted. Of course, I was only eight and could not articulate my feelings then, but yes, it was totally what I did not expect a bunch of words to do to me. It was a slow start and I don’t think I became a voracious reader until I was eleven or twelve. By then, there was no looking back. I devoured books. I would want to come home from school, just because I could read in peace.

When I look at what the experts tell me – you know read to your child every night and all that, I take it with a grain of salt. My parents never read to me or my brother. They helped us read when we were older – I would go ask my father for meanings of words or to explain a paragraph, but that was that. We were pretty much left to read alone. We would discuss books and many a battle followed between my father, my brother and me (my mother would keep out of these fiery debates) and many a tear were shed (by me of course) over the debates.
Books were fun, reading was fun. My father took us to the annual book exhibitions in our little town. He would buy books for himself and us. We had memberships to the library and we would bring and read books from there. We were surrounded by books. We were intrigued by my father’s and uncle’s bookshelves. On boring summer days, when it was too hot to play outside, I would look at our book shelf and find an old tattered book and begin browse through it, only to find when I looked out the window the sun had set and that I had finished reading it in one sitting. My father, I think inculcated a deep love of reading in us without ever reading a single book to us.

So, when I see parents read to their young children with a missionary fervor, every night, I want to ask, do you do it as a chore? Something that “needs” to be done for your child’s development – whatever that might mean. Do you “run though” the books not taking time to talk about it with your child? Do you know if your child comprehends the story? Such reading is futile, I think.

Reading is more than decoding words, you know. It’s about nuances of words and their meaning. It’s about predicting how the sentence might end and then be pleasantly surprised when the author chooses to end it differently. It’s about learning how to guess a meaning of the word from the sentence that wraps it. It’s about cadence. It’s about how some sentences transform meanings of words. It’s about how some words become the soul of a sentence. Reading is much more than stringing words together. Knowing how to string words together will not make you a book lover. Knowing that rest of the stuff will.

I read to Chip, sometimes. Not on a regular basis. Some nights we read half a dozen books and then don’t read for a week. But he is surrounded by books and parents who love to read: albeit different things. Many nights, find, Chip and I reading. He, his own book and me, mine. His with colorful pictures and a sentence or two in big, bold letters on each page, mine covered in small print. Chip reads aloud – no, he can’t really read, but he knows the stories in those books and he tells it aloud to himself while adding detail that is only limited by his imagination. Every once in a while, he peers at my book and asks me what it is about. I tell him. He looks eagerly at the pages that lack color and pictures and I can see the fascination in his eyes. He spells out a few words and finds the pattern here and there on the page and is satisfied. He returns to his book and me to mine. Side by side. Both, book lovers, in their own way.

Edited: Trawl, not Troll, as pointed out by Sue :)