books for babies

[metaphortunate]

Oh, bookstores. We've had some good times together, you and I, haven't we? Half Price Books in Houston, I remember so many long afternoons spent hidden in your stacks reading and rereading your strangely complete Dykes To Watch Out For collection. I apologize for never buying a one of them, but I was still living at home; books about lesbians were

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[mamagotcha]

We spend a lot of time at our local library, and each kid has had a library card from as soon as they could write their name. We go once a week to bring back our haul from the previous week, and to carry off our loot for the coming week.

[telophase]

Maybe this has a bit of bearing on the general situation? When I was a child, from 4 to 6, we spent 2 years in the middle of nowhere in the Serengeti. We brought some books, but many of them had to be for my dad's research, and some of them had to be for my schooling, so we couldn't pack the walls with books as we'd like.

Mom brought a few books that she thought I'd grow into over the next couple of years and a couple to entertain me on the airplane journey--I was reading at 3 and reading Little House in the Big Woods by myself at 4, so she had to guess--and we bought a few books here and there as we drove into Arusha or Nairobi for supplies, and we traded books back and forth with other families on the research station.

And I ended up ravenously reading, without being constantly surrounded by books. I read and re-read the ones I owned, borrowed ones I liked over and over, and even made attempts at reading books way out of my reading age and comprehensibility level. (We'd been given a weird possibly drug-trip-inspired novel called

[harimad]

What I think helped was that my parents obviously loved and respected books, and read them often where I could see them, and read them to me.

This worked when I was growing up, and is working on my young family. Parental examples are incredibly powerful. I also had experiences such as yours in the Serengeti, although for a month rather than years. I read some random Anne McCaffreys a dozen times each because that was what was available, and even tried James Joyce out of desperation.

[_swallow]

Dang, this is such a good question! Being able to read whatever I wanted from my parents' shelves, especially without anyone being able to trace it if I didn't want them to (I guess in retrospect I wonder how much privacy I really had, but otoh I had three younger siblings so my family was fairly distracted) was an incredibly important part of my childhood. Hmm.

[rubrick]

This is a big, important question, and I don't know the answer. Many of the very best traditions of books - reading them in bookstores without buying them, lending them to your friends - just don't work in the ebook world, and there's no incentive for publishers to make them work, because they are money-losing traditions.

[moominmolly]

Yeah. I'm stuck here too.

Also: I don't know how to cultivate a love of reading in a kid, separate from a love of BOOKS.

[reesei]

Amazon sells kindle versions of baby cloth books. I don't even.