Hugin & Munin Journal

Most of the reading I do for the children happens during the school year. Once summer arrives, routines dissolve and bedtime becomes more of a suggestion than a rule. During term time, however, reading is firmly embedded in the evening ritual. These days, that ritual mainly involves the two youngest. The oldest reads independently now—something I had recently begun to reflect on when writing about the difference between reading together and learning to read alone . Finding one book that would genuinely work for all three children would be a Herculean task. It is difficult enough to find something that both a soon-to-be-six-year-old and a nine-year-old will enjoy. Reading aloud is therefore less a matter of selecting the best children’s books than of matching a particular story to particular listeners. Age matters, but so do mood, attention, tiredness and the complicated politics of bedtime. Reading for Two Different Listeners There is the constant stream of questions. Some ar...

I watched Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 with my oldest son today, mostly because he was not quite ready to watch it alone. Sitting in the cinema, half following the film and half watching his reactions, my mind drifted towards several broader trends I have been noticing. To keep this post from turning into a book of its own, I will focus on one of them: children and reading. Promotional poster for Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 , released by Universal Pictures and produced by Blumhouse. Used here for purposes of commentary. Growing Up with Books and Screens We put considerable emphasis on encouraging our children to read. Luxembourgish schools expose them to several languages, so we do not restrict reading to one. At home, English has become the main family language, although neither my wife nor I is a native speaker. Unsurprisingly, it has also become the language in which most of their voluntary reading happens. When I was young, it was difficult to pry a book...

I think most readers have at least a few books that matter more than others: books that inspired them, opened new interests, or otherwise helped shape who they became. Mine mostly come from childhood and adolescence, when a book could still redraw the boundaries of the world. My mother used to read to my brother and me when we were young. I loved it, but I also found it frustratingly slow; I always wanted to know what happened next. I obviously do not remember that time perfectly, but I suspect that impatience helped spur me to learn to read, so that I could devour books on my own. I do not know exactly when I moved from children’s books into books aimed at older readers. I do remember reading The Hobbit on my own in second or third grade, after my mother had already read it to us. It was probably one of the first books to carry me beyond the children’s books I had been reading and into a much wider literary world. My mother later read The Lord of the Rings to us. I cannot plac...