Child’s first reading list
“You look at the world once, in childhood. The rest is memory,” US poet Louise Glück has said.
As parents and society, we need to ensure that the memories of our children are imbued with love, imagination and sensitivity. To ensure this, the best thing to do is to get them to fall in love with books.
As you start your hunt, here’s some help.
A necessary condition to get children to start reading is to pique their curiosity. One of the first books to give thems, then, in this writer’s opinion, is Enid Blyton’s Five-Find Outers and Dog. They’ll definitely be hooked to the adventures of the irrepressible Frederick Trotteville or Fatty and his friends, including Buster the dog, as they solve one mystery after another, much to the annoyance of local policeman Theophilus Goon.
Nancy Drew series by Carolyn Keene and Hardy Boys by Franklin W Dixon can be next. These are traditional choices, however. Other popular reads include, Harry Potter, who has captured children’s imagination for over 15 years now.
New favourites include Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson as well as a new series on the lives of Indian war heroes and Eoin Colfer’s escapades of Artemis Fowl, a child-genius, who cannot really be evil, no matter how hard he tries.
As your child matures (nowadays the maximum upper ceiling age for this is 14, not 18, remember), perhaps he/she will develop a taste for Ruskin Bond, Roald Dahl, Sudha Murty and Aabid Surti.
For the Chugh couple in Sector 15, however, it does matter that their son Abhiraj Chugh, is well-read. The six-year-old has two library memberships, one in Sector 17 and in another private library. “My son can read complete stories by himself. One of his favourites is the Little Red Riding Hood. I believe faculty in words and other cognitive abilities like math is linked. My son is also a super champion in Abacus,” says Parvesh Chugh, the father, a lawyer.
For Ajay Arora, owner of Capital Book Store in Sector 17, children’s books are special as they connect him to the little people. “I frequently find that in Chandigarh, children seem to have a mind of their own when it comes to reading. They pick up their own books. Typically, a 10-year-old is dropped at my shop, as his parents run other errands. The child is happy as he makes his choice of books,” Arora adds. Punjabi and Hindi books also sell well with NRI families in India for a visit, he says.
Finally, what to make of this list? Well, the key is to only suggest and not push your child to read. Never foist your own choice of what you think is suitable for them. If you do this, you will only be perpetrating old traditional, not free thinking. We don’t want this, do we?