A Journey of Three Million Words

My son Patrick just turned 10. I am reading The Fellowship of the Ring to him. Every night we snuggle in his bed together, after saying prayers, and I read about four or five pages before lights out. This has been our routine since he began sleeping in his own bed, which was likely soon before his sister Catherine was born, almost eight years ago.

By the time he was about five, we left behind reading children's books in favor of full-fledged adventures. I decided to take a stab at calculating just how much reading that has amounted to over five years. Even if my assumptions are off, the results are still startling. In any event, the assumptions I used were 4.5 pages per night, for 12 minutes, at 350 words per page, 350 nights per year.

The results? 350 hours of reading, 7,875 pages, 2,756,250 words.

What is even more remarkable to me is we've only read about seven or eight books a year. Here's as many of them as I can remember:

The Chronicles of Narnia - all volumes
Little House - all volumes
Charlotte's Web
Tom Sawyer
Huckleberry Finn
Beowulf
King Arthur
Treasure Island
Kidnapp'd
Robinson Crusoe
Johnny Tremain
Black Beauty
David Copperfield
Little Women
Mutiny on the Bounty
The Last of the Mohicans
Call of the Wild
The Yearling
Caddie Woodlawn
Pollyanna
Heidi
The Secret Garden
The World Wars (Usborne)
The Tempest
A Midsummer Night's Dream
Othello
Romeo and Juliet
Julius Caesar
Macbeth
Hamlet
King Lear
The Hobbit
The Fellowship of the Ring

Patrick, unsurprisingly, is a voracious reader in his own right. He is great pals with the wonderful librarians at our local library. He can easily plow through Johnny Tremain or Treasure Island or The Hobbit on his own. His favorites are The Hardy Boys, Hank the Cowdog, Redwall and the Fr. Brown Reader for Children.

Still, at the end of each day, without exception, no matter what time it is, where we are or what has occurred that day, his one question to me, without fail, is: "You're going to read to me, right?"

It helps that he is auditory. The sound of my voice reading brings a stillness and attentiveness to him that nothing else does. I'm not sure Beowulf would be a suitable choice for most children. For Patrick it was a revelation. The foreignness of the language, the mystery of it, was itself almost narcotic in its effect. I can sense, as I read, that he has drifted off into his own world, completely immersed in the story, his entire being quiet in the act of listening.

And often, when I close the book for the night, he asks, "Can you read a little more, please?" So Patrick is probably more responsible for this achievement, if you can call it that, than I am.

To read a few pages at a time, every single night, year in and year out, is the only way to get through three million words. But I have found, quite unexpectedly, a gift that this kind of reading offers. To read - aloud - great literature, a few pages at a time, every night for many weeks (I think it took six months to read David Copperfield), even to the point of co-opting the appropriate dialect, is to enter in a more complete way the universe created by the author. When, for example, your mind's eye has grown so thoroughly accustomed to what it imagines is the universe of David Copperfield, by the middle of the book, about three months in, it is as if you have become completely fluent, as fluent as a native speaker, in a new language. So fluent, in fact, that a native speaker could not distinguish you from himself.

The only way I can explain the net result of so thoroughly immersing oneself in the universe of one wonderful work of literature after another, day in and day out, for years on end, is to develop so strongly an unspoken, non-verbal language, yet a language nonetheless, not of the mind but of the heart.

How much more might the impact be on a young boy, discovering this world, this language, by listening to his father? I may be privileged to observe some of the external effects of this on Patrick, as he gets older (sob!) and eventually becomes an adult, but it is a certainty that I will never truly understand its meaning, nor will Patrick, for either of us. It is inscribed in our hearts, in a place beyond words.

Which books would you add to this list?

[Author’s note: this was originally written in 2013. Patrick is about to turn 13, and we’re still reading, currently Moby Dick!]