My poor babies, they had no idea what they were in for — I was choosing the books I was going to read to them before the egg was fertilised. When I was pregnant with my first I was in my late twenties, a freelance editor still paying off student debt. I lived in a sharehouse with my partner, who was from the other side of the world, and we’d known each other for just under a year. In some people’s minds we were a long way off creating the ideal conditions for starting a family, but I didn’t care — I was digging out my old copy of Frog & Toad, thinking about the ideal conditions for raising a reader. All I needed, I assumed, was books and good intentions.
Twenty years later I have a more nuanced opinion about childhood reading. For a start, the way my children each learnt to read was markedly different. The books they enjoyed were poles apart. Neither of them was interested, once they got to the stage of reading novels, in the books I’d loved as a child. And although they had some highl…
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