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.