This year has had many challenges, but one of its unexpected joys has been reading to my 4-year-old. Countless hours we’ve spent together in the green armchair in the corner of our living room reading books. All kinds of books: long and short, old and new, funny and sometimes not.
Reading books out loud to a 4-year-old is very different from reading by oneself. There’s a lot of repetition. You really get to know the books, like close personal friends that you look forward to spending time with. You start to look for books with an eye for what might still be fun the third time through.
Understand, the 4-year-old and I have been reading together from the get go. But back in April, something changed. It started with the Railway Stories collection.
Popularly known as the “Thomas the Tank Engine” series, the original 26 books, written by Rev Wilbert Awdry and published between 1946 and 1974, are available as a single collection. I acquired a used edition through a discount bookseller online, but initially it was met with no enthusiasm. Soon enough, however, we found ourselves in marathon sessions, reading one story after another for hours at a time.
Part of the reason, I suspect, is that the “Thomas” stories are a wonder of precision storytelling. The individual books within the collected edition take roughly 15 minutes to read. Each book, focusing on a particular engine or group of engines, has four stories, each story has six or eight color illustrations and some neatly encapsulated moral.
Rev Awdry, an Anglican priest from the English countryside, was a passionate steam locomotive conservationist and the stories balance the fantasy of talking steam engines with a strong sense of realism about how railroads work. There is a wide cast of characters developed over successive episodes, as there are on television series now. Taken together, the stories have surprising depth. It was a good thing, too, because we read them many, many times.
Since reading “Thomas,” we have gone from classics like the original “Winnie-the-Pooh” stories or “James and the Giant Peach” to more recent fare like “The Spiderwick Chronicles.” A few of them I purchased outright, but most of them I got from the local public library.
The Reddick Library in Ottawa has been a surprise of its own this year. All through the pandemic they have remained in operation, although the building was not open to the public for many months. Nevertheless, we have been able to keep up our regular trips for new reading material. We miss being able to browse the stacks and hang around the children’s section, but are thankful for librarians who have picked out books for us (they know what they’re doing, it turns out).
One of the strangest things about this year is how ordinary it has been - despite everything, we have gone on living our lives - but also how different day-to-day life is. The pandemic has meant that my partner and I provide all the childcare for our 4-year-old, and it was not easy making that happen this summer.
But I did end up spending a lot of time reading with my child and that was pretty great.
• Samuel Barbour lives in Ottawa and teaches economics to community college students. He can be reached at tsloup@shawmedia.com.
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