Penny, the children’s librarian, tirelessly pulled out book after book, reaching and stooping and traversing along the shelves.
Teddy stood like a salt statue, arms stiff at his sides. Occasionally I asked encouragingly, “Want to take that one?”
It was OK, I said, not to read every book borrowed. Behind Penny’s back he shook his head quickly, furtively.
All last summer, I dragged my sons to the library. I’ve always dragged them to the library.
“Why do you always make us do this?” they wail.
When I was growing up, my mother always took us to the library, or she’d go, then bring each of us a stack of books. I grew up reading and rereading. I had probably read “A Little Princess,” by Frances Hodgson Burnett, five times by age 10. I read all the Laura Ingalls Wilder books twice – at least. (My younger sister cried when that series ran out.)
I would go through spurts in my reading: At one point I read all the pioneer books I could get my hands on, including those, such as the William O. Steele novels – which were fragile, old books even when I was a child – written for boys.
Over the years, I’ve had a hard time explaining to my mother why my sons weren’t exactly the most avid readers. While they liked the books they read in school, outside the classroom, their interest came and, more often, went. It’s hard for little boys to sit still.
When Teddy’s fifth-grade teachers assigned 30 minutes of reading every night, it helped greatly. He complied willingly because it was at the end of the day and he was lying down. Reading at night remains a habit to this day.
The next milestone occurred when I returned from Canmore, Alberta, carrying “Raven’s End,” by Canadian author Ben Gadd.
I caught Teddy with it open at 11 p.m.
“You’re supposed to be asleep!”
“I couldn’t stop,” he said helplessly. “It was so exciting.”
I wrote a note to Ben, a recent acquaintance. A naturalist who had written a novel about the ravens and other animals of the Canadian Rockies, near Banff, and the father of two sons, he wrote back that “It can be hard to attract boys to anything we think of as literature. But boys, especially, seem to like this story. Maybe it’s the blood-and-guts aspect of raven life!”
Teddy also loved “Watership Down” and the “Red Wall” series. His younger brother, Roy, during one summer stint, read dozens of the slim “Magic Treehouse” books. Both adored the musket-blasting, buckskin-leggings heroics in the few William O. Steele books we were able to borrow through interlibrary searches by our kind, local staff.
What’s more, the librarians listened to us. When I saw in Newsweek that the Hardy Boys books were being updated – the brothers, who once mulled over mysteries along the lines of who had broken into the neighbor’s garage, now have long hair and solve murders at the X Games – they ordered the new ones.
To my dismay, though, after all that, my sons read just one of the new books each.
My efforts surge and then dry up. It is all I can do to keep up with work, and shuttling the rounds of kids’ soccer and mountain-biking and ski practice and, oh yes, pathetic efforts at an athletic and literary life of my own. Then last summer I got another kick in the pants. My mother, a retired teacher, scolded, “You know, reading is the No.1 indicator of academic success.”
I raised my tired head to resume the campaign.
It wasn’t easy. At that time, Teddy was reading only cursorily. Roy read only bike catalogs. I’d take the boys to the library, and they’d slip out to ride scooters on the sidewalk.
Then it happened: Teddy discovered the “New Prophecy” series, by Erin Hunter. The books build upon her “Warriors” series, which he’d liked, about clans of cats living in a forest.
He read the first book swiftly, closed it, and asked, “Mom, can we go to the library?”
I thought I was hearing things.
“Today?” he asked urgently.
Roy, given a gift certificate by our friend Betsy, bought the first three Warriors series books.
He started reading and didn’t stop. He’d read before dinner and after dinner. One night we had company, someone he even liked, and he darted off down the hall – and slammed the door.
He occasionally lifted his head to say, “Whew, that was an exciting battle.” He listed me the characters in the clans: the names of the Elders, the Medicine Cat and the Medicine Apprentice, and all the Warriors and Warrior Apprentices (there were a lot of those). These books leaned particularly heavily on havoc, with eyes clawed out, blood spattering across snowy white cat fur, etc.
One day I whispered to our head librarian, Marilyn, “What am I going to do when this series ends?”
“There are always more series,” she said and showed me a website to find them.
School started up again, as did homework, soccer and then ski team, and somewhere in there reading slipped again.
Newsweek has just written about a 2006 survey indicating that 40 percent of kids between the ages of 5 and 8 read every day. By fourth grade, it drops to 29 percent. The article suggests that by then kids are either burned out by school and tests or are distracted.
Certainly my kids’ attention is increasingly fragmented. They do sports and PlayStation, download music; one meets friends online at the kid-friendly Club Penguin website. They have nightly homework.
One more good thing happened at Christmas, though, when my mother, sister and stepsister all gave the boys books or gift certificates, and we spent a pleasant afternoon in a bookstore swapping (by permission) and choosing.
Roy, now 10, froze with delight to see that the next in the eternal “Warriors” books had just come out, and left clutching it. Teddy, now 13, was given a teen book by Anthony Horowitz and picked out several others. He read the Horo- witz book on the plane home, and we ordered the sequel through our library.
Creating a reading pattern takes a village and a family, I am realizing. More than anything, it seems to mean keeping trying. Taking them to the well, again and again and again.
Alison Osius, executive editor of Rock and Ice magazine, is a climber, skier and parent who lives in Carbondale.
