Building a Library

An expectant father has paid me the high honor of trusting my judgement and asking me what books he should buy and stock in his nursery for this children. And he hopes to have many (may God hear him!)

I will recommend some books, but I’d like to hear your recommendations as well, dear reader.

But first I will recommend that no matter what you read to your kids, dear fathers and fathers-to-be, that you just READ TO YOU KIDS!

I am in the habit of reading to my children every night, weekdays and weekends, except on days set aside for novel writing, when the wife reads to the kids. I have done it regularly as sunset every night since their infancy, and also told stories orally, the most successful of which is my version of Jack and the Beanstalk. (In my version, Jack owns a pressure suit, and so can endure the drop in pressure and temperature as he climbs to the stratosphere).

The upshot of it is, that my kids heard  all my favorites from when I was a child, including science fiction books and fantasies, that otherwise they never would have heard or read, and to this day I spend an hour each Sunday reading to them from the Bible, or from CS Lewis, or from GK Chesterton, or from Peter Kreeft. They are teenagers, but are bright teenagers, and none of this material is over their heads (except that the allusions and references of Chesterton I need to stop and explain. And the stopping and explaining usually turns into digressions, lectures, jokes and side material. Chesterton’s THE EVERLASTING MAN is being read so slowly, since I stop for a digression every paragraph, perhaps every line, so that we now call it THE EVERLASTING BOOK.

Making it an unbreakable habit to read is much more important than what you read.

That said, let me frame my recommendations in terms of what morals they teach.  For as ‘Wright’s Ninth Rule of Writing’ states, every story teaches a moral, whether intended by the author or not. Whatever the winning behavior is, whatever behavior in the tale leads to success, achieves the stated goal, that is the moral being taught and the example being presented.

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Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.