I used to have racks of books, I like them and I like reading them — a lot. When I was younger, except for the sports section, I used to read the whole newspapers every day. My friends used to ask me questions, which I loved answering and they would asked, “Which part of the Newspaper did you not read?”
After relocating from Bombay to Pune to Bangalore, I decided to replace almost all physical objects with their digital counterparts wherever possible. I started culling books, movies, etc. By 2013–2014, I had successfully moved to eBooks and Amazon Kindle played a big role in my journey.
However, along my journey with books, I realized a small shortcoming that turn out to be a major life-impacting event. In 2016, when I upgraded my Kindle, and gave the old one to my daughter — she didn’t really like it. When I told her that I do read a lot and reading is a good thing, she told me something very profound, “I never see you read books. You are just reading on your computer (kindle), or on the phone and is not really reading.”
Kids copy us a lot, they watch us with an ever eager eye, wreathed in questions. That was when I decided, I need to always be reading at-least one physical book and have it around the house. So, I try to have one physical book for every 5 or so eBooks that I read/buy.
Laaija reads in the car.
Laaija reads in the plane.
My daughter do love reading and seeing me “reading” does encourages her to read more. She gorges on books pretty fast. I bought her a book and asked her after few days, “Did you read the books I bought. They seem interesting.” Well,“I already finished reading them.”
Go ahead, read more physical books in front of your kids. Encourage them to read physical books. They are less distracting and help the kids focus.
On a lighter note, my younger one is one step ahead — she is already on top of them.
Happy Reading.
