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Larkin Reading

OK, I admit it, Molly and I are bookaholics. What can you expect? We were both English majors in college, both English teachers later on (she still is one), and I'm a writer to boot. And now here's Larkin, toddler bibliophile. From the start she was entranced — a two-month-old whose wailing magically ceased whenever she stared up at the bookshelf in the TV room. Two-plus years later, we've read her how many books? Well, at least ten a day, often more. That means eight thousand readings so far. No wonder Molly and I have laryngitis.

It can be pretty wearying to plow your way through another William Steig story (so many words!), only to have Larkin flip back to the start and demand, "Again!" Sometimes we say no. But these days, if your child wants to read, you feel reluctant to jinx it. Especially when reading is so family-friendly. Watching a Curious George video, Larkin brooks no interruption; she's in the classic TV trance state. Over a book, though, she remains conversational – anticipating and chorusing, asking questions, commenting freely. Reading is sociable. You don't park your two-year-old in front of a book. You join in. Then there are the times Molly and I catch Larkin sitting quietly with a book, poring through it. It's clear that she's already in the sway, in the deep captivity, of literature. She's booked — for life, I hope.

It's fascinating to watch a toddler's vocabulary take root and grow from books. Larkin recites whole passages, lifts words and phrases and concepts — pieces of bright cloth she takes from her favorite stories and restitches into her own patchwork of observations. At the park a few weeks ago, she noticed an ugly black welt on the plastic superstructure of the playscape. It looked like someone had tried to burn it. "Did the bad boys do that?" she asked, breathlessly. The idea came straight from The Red Balloon, the 1950s story of a boy running through the alleys of a working-class Parisian neighborhood, trying to elude a gang of toughs — the bad boys! — intent on stealing his beautiful balloon.

For me, rediscovering forgotten childhood books (The Red Balloon was a favorite of mine) has been a great fringe benefit of reading to Larkin. Last summer, in a kids' store in Woodstock, NY, Molly and I found Esphyr Slobodkina's Caps for Sale, the droll folktale of a mustachioed hat peddler who wanders through village and countryside, only to be victimized, one drowsy afternoon, by a band of larcenous, mischievous monkeys. Paging through it took me back forty-five years to my childhood bedroom, where I'd sit with my mother on the big bed as she read to me. I remembered how I laughed at the silly man ranting at a tree full of monkeys; and how, when you read your favorite books, you always knew the funny (or scary) parts were coming, and waiting for them was a big part of the pleasure.

Larkin's bookshelves contain several of my old favorites. Alongside Caps for Sale are Mike Mulligan and his Steam Shovel; The Little Engine That Could; Babar the Elephant; and The Story of Ferdinand the Bull, about a strapping but sensitive and poetic-minded Spanish bull whose sole desire is to sit peacefully beneath a favorite tree and smell the flowers. The story hinges on a funny scene where Ferdinand, stung by a bee, bursts out in a rampage that misleads the bullfight promoters from Madrid into thinking he'll be a terror in the bullring. Larkin loves this. "What would you do if you were a bumblebee and a bull sat on you?" she'll ask out of nowhere. "You'd sting him!"

I think of these as "my" books, these old favorites that I'm passing along to Lark. But checking the title pages, I see that all of them were actually first published between 1930 and 1939, which means that they were my parents' books, long before they were mine. As such, they form a link from childhood to childhood, across the generations and now — with my mother gone — across death itself. This brings extra oomph to the commonplace notion that great literature is deathless. Revisiting pages I last encountered when I was four and my mother was by my side makes the memory of her fresh again, conjuring her physical presence as I experienced it then, large and warm and comforting.

Tonight Molly is going out with a friend, and I'll read a few bedtime books with Larkin. We'll sit on Molly's and my bed, the lamp turned low and the big picture windows to the west catching a last afterglow on the horizon as I open Pete's A Pizza or I Love You, Stinky Face, and Larkin snuggles down in my lap. I cherish these and other new favorites, books Larkin and I have shared laughter and tenderness over. What's Wrong, Little Pookie? Five Little Monkeys. The Snowy Day. Kiss Goodnight. These books form the first way-stations in a little girl's education; and they carry an older dad's hope that some day many decades hence, rediscovered in adulthood, they will summon for her the vivid presence of someone who loved her more than she could know.

Meanwhile, we read them, with yours truly playing the softie in the inevitable negotiation as reading time becomes bedtime. "One more!" Larkin insists when the "absolute last" book closes — and how can I say no?