Holly Gramazio’s recently released novel, THE HUSBANDS, is an instant New York Times bestseller and a “Read with Jenna” Today Show Book Club pick. This exuberant debut delights in asking: How do we navigate life, love and choice in a world of never-ending options? As a child, Holly had plenty of options when it came to books. And for a few years, her mum would read to her almost every night. It was only when Holly was 9 or 10, and she began reading to her brothers, that she gained a greater appreciation for everything her mum did to foster her love of reading at a young age.
The story my mum tells about reading to me is this.
First, she made it through all the picture books. Over and over, my favorite books returning every night. When I was little, it was just the two of us, so it was always her turn to do the bedtime stories. She read them all: nursery rhymes, animals, adventures, a book about extremely specific space facts that I was really into for a few months.
When I got old enough for chapter books, she kept it up, even when I probably could have managed the books on my own: Enid Blyton, Roald Dahl, Colin Thiele and Astrid Lindgren. We also had books on tape, as well as a recording of my dad in Scotland reading out fairy tales. Those were good, but they weren’t the same.
And then, finally --- finally --- 50 pages into THE HOBBIT, after what must have been five or six solid years of reading aloud almost every night, that was it. She was done. She’d had enough. No monsters for her, no made-up words. If I wanted to read full-blown magic-worlds fantasy, I was on my own.
That’s where her version of the story ends. Except, in reality, that wasn’t the end of it, of course. Her chore of “read to Holly” just became “take Holly to the library.”
From that point on, I went through a lot of books. When there weren’t any left at the local library that I hadn’t read, we ventured further and further afield. Even now, I remember most of the different suburbs of my hometown by their libraries: Salisbury North with its long, narrow room; Mount Barker with --- thrillingly --- Tamora Pierce’s second Song of the Lioness book, not just the first; the big library in the city center, which had almost all the Great Brain books.
By then we’d been joined by a stepdad and, a little later, first one brother and then another. I took my fair share of turns reading to the boys. That was when I found out --- to my utter dismay, at the age of maybe 9 or 10 --- that reading to little kids is really, really boring.
Yes, it’s sweet. Yes, you love them. Yes, I look back on those times fondly now. Yes, it’s a special experience that’s only possible for a few fleeting years. I don’t disagree. Once the boys were a little older and the book lineup got a little more varied, I really loved it. But there are whole years when kids just want the same books. Over and over again! I’d try to hide one interminable book about a farm that I’d grown to dread particularly: “Oh it’s not here, we’ll have to have something different.” But then the boys would find it, tucked under the bookshelf out of sight.
Doing that every night? When it’s always your turn? When the interminable book could well be, for weeks at a time, the same set of very specific facts about space?
When my mum tells the story about THE HOBBIT, it’s a little bit of a sidelong boast about how good her six-year-old was at reading. It’s also a joke about her taste in books, as well as mine, and how even the most determined maternal love has its limits. And it’s about how those limits are reached to the point of repeatedly reading out the names Dwalin, Balin, Kili, Fili, Dori, Nori, Ori, Oin, Gloin, Bifur, Bofur and Bombur.
The truth, though, is that reading to little kids is really, really boring. But she did it anyway…and for so long that reading became my favorite thing.
