Who Invented Reading?

Last night at 8:15, just before my younger son, Aidan, fell asleep in his bed, he said, "One of my most favorite things to do in the world is read."

I was lying on his bed next to him, trying to help him choose what to dream about, and I nodded in the dark and smiled. Then I pinched myself. Because Aidan's words were the ones I'd been secretly waiting on these past years—words that were part of the whole sentences I'd been hoping to hear since before Aidan was born.

And all along I've been feeding him and his older brother, Thorne, books from a running reading list I add to and subtract from in my head. It's been an orchestration—an explicit series of calculated book moves to make my love of reading to rub off on them.

And it's already worked once. Thorne lies in bed at night now and travels far far away on the words of his latest novel. But I'd been working on Aidan lately.

"You get so focused," Aidan said to me then. "It's like you're IN the book. It's so relaxing."

One of the biggest surprises about mothering has been that I never know what my kids will warm to in the end—I've planned and schemed and filled their shelves with Frog and Toad and Charlotte and her web—but I've always known that reading still may not take for them. Because the act of reading, in the end, is a mysterious, personal thing. Some kids are pulled by the magnetic force of story. Some aren't.

I gave Aidan a kiss goodnight then, and I still couldn't shake my smile. He was a reader now. More than that, he was one of the converted. I stood up and began to ease my way out of his dark room. This has always been the trickiest part of bedtime—the moment he never wants to come, when the goodnight is final, and he's left all alone. But last night he laughed out loud in his bed.

"Who invented reading?" He asked me then. "Who invented the book? Actually," he said and paused. "Who invented the alphabet? Because that person is awesome."