DAUGHTER

I have read to our daughter since before she was born. In the last weeks of my wife's pregnancy, I would lie on the bed, rest my head near her belly and read to our child. I read Barbara Kingsolver's book of essays, High Tide in Tuscon. I read Tony Earley's Somehow Form a Family. My wife told me that the baby inside would quiet down and be still once I had started reading. I did it knowing that the child could even then hear my voice and not for any other reason than to get her used to the sound of it. After she was born, I read to her everyday. I came to know by memory The Big Red Barn and The Very Hungry Caterpillar, could likely still, if I tried, recite passages from them. It became a ritual, something we did after bath and before bed. I remember so many quiet evenings on the couch, the warmth of our daughter beside me, feeling the very shivering tension of her excitement and anticipation, the strength of her concentration.

Over the years we graduated up in our reading. I cannot recall the first chapter book we read, but since then we have literally read hundreds of books together. It has been one of the joys of my life to open up the world of reading to her. I will never forget the look on her face when I first guided her to the juvenile fiction section of our local library. She saw immediately the possibility of it all and grinned up at me. I read books with her that I loved as a child, The Incredible Journey and Where the Red Fern Grows and Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH. But we also read books together that I had not, books that I came to love as much as she did. Books by Kate DiCamillo became a favorite for us both and we read nearly all of The Boxcar Children. I will forever remember the months we spent reading the entire Chronicles of Narnia, a series our daughter loved so much that when we finally turned the last page of the seventh and final book, I asked her what we should read next and her answer, without hesitation, was to start again at the very beginning.

More and more we told relatives who asked for gift suggestions about books she wanted and, at some point, she came to own The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. She longed to read it. I held off for a while, hesitant to bring into her consciousness the serious and weighty issues brought forth by that book. But I had mixed feelings about it, because it is also a penultimate book about the magic and freedom of childhood and I wanted to share with her the fun in reading it. So, I decided to be honest with her, explaining my hesitancy to read this particular book because of a certain word used over and over again, a word full of hate and ignorance that was spoken as part of the ordinary language of the time and not one that we should ever repeat in conversation. She patiently stopped my earnest and sincere lecture to let me know that she was already very well aware of the word. I could rest assured that she understood its gravity and the reasons it was not to be used in our own daily language. So, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn became one the more memorable books we have read together and I was proud of the good and critical questions it prompted from her. It opened up for us many conversations about morality and truth and the hard complexities of being human that I do not think we would have otherwise had. She wrestled mightily with the fact that not every question can be answered, that very few choices are ever absolutely clear-cut and that sometimes people we are supposed to obey and respect are just as capable themselves of being wrong and of disappointing us.   

Not very long after we read Huckleberry Finn our daughter became utterly enraptured by some books about a certain hero of the wizarding world, and our regular reading time came quickly to a halt. The Harry Potter series was one she came to own all her own and quite obsessively, though I did watch the movies with her. A somewhat hard and fast rule in our house is that you must read the book before you are allowed to watch the movie, so I did get to share in the anticipation of discovering the next part of the film version of the story after she completed each book. Part of the new state of things was that she was reading now for not only her own personal pleasure, but also because of her school's reading program. And, she had become what I had so wished she would: a reader and a voracious and passionate one at that. Once, noticing the library's display about Banned Books Week, she stood aghast and asked as if the mere thought of such a thing was utterly ridiculous, "Why would anyone ban a book, Dad?" Why indeed. I mourned the loss our reading time, but I also gave thanks each time I caught her curled up with a book in a chair or wrapped in a blanket with one on her bed or, best of all, overcome with sudden laughter, her head bent in that familiar reading pose we all know.

The only downside to this is something I have mentioned here before. To my ever-widening chagrin, she steadfastly avoids any book I recommend she read. How can this be? Especially after all the amazing books we have shared. And, yes, I have even tried the reverse psychology route. "Oh, you wouldn't like this one. It's far above your reading level and probably wouldn't interest you at all." She was on to my ploy immediately, much to the amusement of the library staff who overheard our conversation. But, recently there opened up a small crack in her armor, thrilling me. She and I went to the movies a week or so ago and saw for the first time the preview for a forthcoming version of The Hobbit. Given our daughter's propensity toward grand and sweeping epics of the fantastical sort, her eyes widened at the prospect of seeing it. And, it does look fantastic. I explained to her that The Hobbit is a book, a very famous book in fact, and the first in a very famous series about an entire other-world, much like the worlds of her beloved Harry Potter and of Narnia.

"You know what this means," I asked. Her face broke into a wide smile, "Yep. We have to read that book."