Greg Bruce: The rise and fall of reading happy hour

Getting kids to read: Not as easy as it looks.

Greg Bruce tries to show his kids the wonder of reading.

Two or three months ago, Zanna said she wished our daughters, 8 and 6, would read more, and I agreed. This was a place we had been before, many times, but this time she followed up by asking if I had any suggestions as to how we might encourage it.

I probably wasn't as engaged as I could have been. I might have sighed. She often asks me to contribute ideas for familial improvement, but I usually have none, and that is probably by choice. Part of the issue this time was that I knew nothing could be done, the same way I know nothing can be done about anything, that things just are as they are, and so we may as well get on with life. This is the part of me Zanna hates more than any other, the worst part of me. Eventually, because I knew I couldn't say nothing, I said, "Read more?" I might have shrugged. She might have sighed.

A few weeks later she told me that she'd heard someone talking on a podcast ("because that's the kind of emotional labour I do for this family") about their family's weekly, "reading happy hour" - a special time in which they would sit together with snacks and drinks and read silently. As someone whose preferred social interactions are with and through books, I thought there was something lovely about this extraordinarily naive idea.

On one level - the level of being able to read uninterrupted for an hour - reading happy hour sounded idyllic to me, but this wasn't about me; it was about me trying to pass on my love of books to the people who have spent eight years keeping me from them, partly in the hopes that one day they might feel bad about that.

I didn't have high hopes for reading happy hour. Our kids are not big fans of change and don't have the longest attention spans and tend to be resistant to anything we suggest not involving lollies. Furthermore, from the moment we say, "Okay, children, it's time to do X," it takes about an hour until they start moving roughly in that direction. So when we told them about reading happy hour, I was surprised to see how excited they were. I allowed myself to fantasise briefly about its success and our subsequent future as a family of booklovers: summer holidays at a house near a beach we would never go to, lying around inside all day on battered couches reading underappreciated novels we would discuss over dinner, before going to bed early to read.

We set the first session for a Friday afternoon at 4.30pm. In the morning, excitement was already high and it built throughout the day, centred mostly on the snacks. We laid out a smorgasbord of guacamole, corn chips, crackers, cheese and sliced pear, but the kids ate only plain corn chips. Zanna and I had glasses of booze and the kids had juice. Tallulah made herself a fort in the tiny space between the bookshelf, the wall and the couch, using a cushion and blanket; Clara put a blanket over the back of the couch; and together they built Casper a fort in the middle of the lounge, using four couch cushions for the walls and a blanket for the roof. I sat on a beanbag in the afternoon sun, with my booze and snacks and commenced reading Bug Week, by Airini Beautrais. We set a timer for an hour and everyone was quiet, hunched over their books. I looked across the room and my heart was so full, I was hardly able to focus on the book.

EPILOGUE

After about three weeks, the girls stopped making forts for Casper, so he started invading theirs. Tallulah: "Casper, give me my personal space and go out of Tallulah's reading zone." Forts are now banned.

At the beginning of a session a few weeks ago, Clara and I had the following exchange:
Me: Is everybody ready?
Clara: No.
Me: Have you got something to read, Clara?
Clara: No.
Me: Go and get something then. Finding something to read is half the fun!
Clara: No it isn't.

There's been no more guacamole.

The event is now known as Reading Happy 45 Minutes.

None of this is to say, especially to Zanna, that the effort hasn't been worth it. In the eight years between having Tallulah and starting reading happy hour, I'd hardly read anything I didn't write. In the last 10 weeks, I've read three terrific books: Bug Week, Diana Wichtel's Driving to Treblinka and David Ballantyne's Sydney Bridge Upside Down.

At the start of each session, as I see the focus on my children's faces, as the silence settles over the family, I feel a deep contentment, bordering on joy. I am reminded that the world is a better place when we don't give up on the things that matter to us.