Mamas Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Passionate Readers (Well, Okay, You Can Let Them But Don't Try to Force It)

I've been hearing the pitter-patter of little feet more than is typical for the blogosphere: Camassia and Eve want your children's book recommendations; Papercuts has returned to the subject of "gateway literature" (the first hit is always free); even Alex Massie has put aside the famous British dislike of children to wax tender about Babar. Well, if they've declared it Kids-'n'-Art week on the Internet, I'm game.

Briefly, to oblige Camassia: Three Men in a Boat is the best thing for any young reader you see veering off into sci-fi/fantasy addiction—I can't remember if I was in second or third grade when I read it, but I remember that it did wonders—and my favorite picture book has always been Jack Kent's Round Robin. "He ate and he ate and he ate and he ate until he looked more like a ball than a bird. Everyone called him Round Robin, and he was too fat to fly." Hijinks proceed from there.

I'll also recommend the other pillar of my early childhood, one which will delight armchair analysts: What Girls Can Be, a book of depressing answers. "If I am a secretary, I'll type without mistakes!"—absurd. (Everybody knows that typing with mistakes is much more fun.) It ends, of course, with "Or I might be a mommy with some children of my own!" The story of how my feminism ended up in a Schrödinger box is a complicated one, but it probably starts with that book.

I should admit that I'm not always so willing to put a book at the center of a genesis story. Books appear very late in my story as a film buff, and not at all in my conversion to Catholicism. In the beginning is not always the word, and it's tempting to put it there retrospectively because it makes a better story. Still, I have a very vivid memory of the verse that made me a conservative—I fell in love with the famous Alexander Pope closer "A needless alexandrine ends the song / That, like a wounded snake, drags its slow length along" and decided that it could only work on so very many levels because of the poet's trust in stodgy things like form and structure—as well as the moment I stepped out of the UConn library after three unplanned hours spent over Charles Bernheimer's Decadent Subjects with the ambition to become an aesthete. (I still have the handwritten notes I took that day, and the paper that came out of it.)

The most important line in Augustine's Confessions is "It cannot be that the son of these tears should perish." It's the moment Monica realizes how the story has to end. Still, it's crucial that the bishop delivers the line less as a comfort and more as an exasperated attempt to get rid of a woman by whom he feels pestered. The point, I suppose, is that these gateway moments happen, with books as often as with anything else, but they're impossible to plan. That being said, anyone who wants a copy of What Girls Can Be is welcome to borrow mine.