Photo courtesy of the Gates Archive
“One great thing about reading with your kids is that you don’t ever have to stop,” says Melinda Gates. “I’ve been reading to them since the day they were born, and I still share books with them today, even though our oldest is in college.”
When the kids were very young, I loved reading Guess How Much I Love You with them. It’s about a mother rabbit and her baby, and once the kids could talk, they would do the baby rabbit, with baby rabbit voices, and I would do the mother rabbit. As we went on we’d embellish on what happens in the book and talk about the different ways we loved each other, which meant that reading the book was always a wonderful voyage of discovery for all of us.
Bill and I both loved reading Love You Forever, the kids’ favorite bedtime story. It’s about life from birth to death, about the continuity of generations, and as we read we could see the road ahead for our family. The kids never understood why we were always crying by the time we finished.
As my two younger kids got older, we started reading Jacqueline West’s The Books of Elsewhere, about a girl who gets transported inside mysterious paintings on the walls. We’d pull up to school a little early every morning and read these silly, fun books together, as a way to start the day with our priorities in the right place.
Then there’s the Philip Pullman series His Dark Materials -- The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, and The Amber Spyglass. My son Rory and I went through a phase in which we read a lot of dystopian fiction together, and we loved the writing and the imagination in these books so much that we talked about them at family dinner and went around the table figuring out what our daemons would be if people actually had daemons.
I always enjoyed Ray Bradbury’s short stories when I was growing up, and I thought Rory might feel the same way. When I started reading Fahrenheit 451 aloud to him, we were both struck by its specificity -- not just the specificity of the language but also the crispness with which he brings the world and its issues to light. We did a little research and were astounded to find out that he wrote it in nine days, at a typewriter he rented for 10 cents/30 minutes. It cost him $9.80 to write that book, or at least the story it was based on.
And the book we read most recently is The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. After my sister saw the play in London she thought we’d really enjoy reading the book, and she was right. The book gives you a different perspective on a kid with Asperger’s. His family really loves him but they’re also under a lot of stress and it takes a real emotional toll on them. So we all enjoyed peeking into the mind and heart of somebody who looked at the world a little differently.
Looking back at this list I see so many books I’ve left out. I could probably make another dozen lists of books I loved reading with my kids just as much. But I guess that’s the point. Ultimately, sharing stories is a way to connect with other people, and that’s what I love about reading with Jennifer, Phoebe, and Rory: it a magical way for us to connect with each other.
(She’s a Philip Pullman fan! Hooray!)
