Paging all readers: A love of literature

The June I was due to pass Grade 3, my mom promised that if I came home with a decent report card she would buy me a Nancy Drew book for every week of the summer. I did, and she did, and I remember that hot, dusty Saskatchewan summer as the one I spent dodging chores to go sleuthing in Larkspur Lane and the Lilac Inn, skulking in the basement with a bowl of popcorn and The Secret of the Moss-Covered Mansion, and lamenting the fact that my family's modern California-style home lacked sliding panels and hidden staircases.

My love affair with books didn't, thank goodness, turn out to be a summer romance. At 14 I stumbled into Middle Earth at our local branch of the Wheatland Regional Library. I'd never heard of The Lord of the Rings, and a glance at the first page led me to expect a sort of hallucinogenic Wind in the Willows. After reading the whole trilogy, I bought my own set and guarded it as if it was my own intellectual property; only when I got to University did I discover, to my chagrin, that the Tolkein epic enjoyed marquee fame. To this day I am resentfully, absurdly proprietary about "my" hobbits and elves.

For a child just learning to read, the summer holiday can represent a great escape from phonics, word-recognition and spelling drills. Or, it can offer a spectacular opportunity to flex those new literary wings -- for no purpose other than pure pleasure.

"The greatest gift you can give a child is to help her become a reader," says Ellen Douglas, an avid reader, tireless promoter of literacy skills and teacher librarian in Toronto. Reading, she says, teaches nothing less than "what it means to be human. Through reading, a child lives acts of kindness, bravery and loyalty, and comes to understand grief, loneliness and fear."

Since every good novel's plot is, essentially, a problem to be solved, good books help develop problem-solving skills, says Ellen. They allow a child to learn vicariously from the protagonist (for example, that it's not a wise idea to spy on people from a dumb waiter, a la Harriet the Spy) -- "lessons that contribute to her growing sense of what is wise and rash, kind and cruel, right and wrong."

And, of course, they're just plain, huge, incomparable fun. Where else can you find such complete escape, such heartstopping adventure, such a splendid chance to explore and share somebody else's most private lives, thoughts and emotions?

"The book that has had the most lasting impression on me was The Wolves of Willoughby Chase by Joan Aiken," says Ellen. "It was the first novel I read independently. I felt as though I had been swept away into an exciting world of danger, heroism and intrigue." (Set in 19th-century England, Wolves stars Bonnie and Sylvie, who are left in the care of a Miss Slighcarp when Bonnie's parents embark on a lengthy sea voyage. Miss Slighcarp reveals herself to be a cruel and dangerous woman who sells the estate's assets, dismisses the servants and sends the children to a workhouse where they live in misery until they escape and set out to reclaim their rightful inheritance.)

Give your children their rightful inheritance -- to a lifetime love of books. "There are no tricks to becoming a good reader;" notes Ellen, "good readers learn to read well by reading."