I'm taking my eleven-year-old daughter to the library, and the bus passes a Chapters bookstore. "Can we go to Chapters? " she begs. On the way home from the library, she wants to stop in Duthie's. My nephews from New York say I have overdone it when she drags them from bookstore to bookstore as a way of showing them the highlights of Vancouver. My daughter loves to read: she'll read at the beach, on the bus, in a restaurant, before a movie begins. I've had more than one of her teachers complain that if she gets bored with their teaching, the book slips out of her desk and on to her lap. How did this happen?

My infant daughter gave me a new understanding of the description " sleeps like a baby". She never slept; she wanted to be held and she wanted to be walked. TV didn't soothe her; only walking and murmuring worked. To keep our sanity, my husband and I would take turns walking this kid from room to room while reading a book aloud. The person walking had to do the reading. Not an easy trick, but if Hannah heard nursery rhymes, poetry, Shakespeare, and novels we were reading at the time, she would stop crying...as long as we continued to read and walk.

We bought her books as soon as we knew I was pregnant. A book of nursery rhymes, "Pat the Bunny", "Goodnight Moon." We started reading these to her as soon as she was born. By the time she outgrew them, they were tattered and worn with re-reading.

I think she was around four months old when I was reading her a book about a butterfly. She looked from the book to the butterfly hanging from the ceiling, making the connection between the two. We made a huge fuss, dancing her around the room, pointing to the butterfly in the book and the butterfly in the room. We even made up a butterfly song.

From three months on, the library was a scheduled stop, two or three times a week. I would read to her every book she pulled off the shelf. I held her close whenever I read to her, kissed her, tickled her, cooed at her. Reading together became something special we did every day.

She has had her own bookcase (now expanded to four) since birth. In other words, we buy books, we borrow books, we trade books for her. There were pop-up books, funny books, pretty picture books, moralistic, horrible books, Dr. Seuss, Samuel Coleridge, and authors whose names didn't even get on the books.

Before she could read, she would often insist that we read her favorite book at that time, over and over and over. "I like Red" was a favorite for months. "Tiggy Goes to the Hospital", a book both my husband and I hated more with each reading, was a favorite for what seemed like years.

I used to bargain with Hannah, "I'll read Tiggy if we can read some Christopher Robin poems before Tiggy." Despite my reluctance to reread books so often, it served a purpose: Hannah, like most children, memorized her books before she could read them. I would find her in her room "reading" the book to herself from memory. In fact, it became a ritual to give her books in her crib in the morning while I took a shower, in the afternoon before she napped and in the evening before she slept.

She still rereads books, and we still bargain about books. Hannah is an ardent Science Fiction fan. It's a genre with no appeal for me. This summer I agreed to read "Halfway Human" a book she loved, if she would read "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn". She grumbled a little through the first 50 pages, then she was hooked. She has reread it a dozen times or more.

Science Fiction books can, as I discovered by reading "Halfway Human" and other books we bargained about, be quite violent and racy. Yet, I don't censor Hannah's reading. She now browses in the Adult section of the library and bookstores, and I never say "You can't read that". Consequently, she self-censors. "That book's too old for me," she'll say when I ask why she stopped reading a particular book. If she finishes it and it's upsetting to her, I have to read it, so we can discuss it. Sometimes she'll throw a book across her bed, if it angers her or makes her too sad.

We went through the "Babysitter" series, which made me cringe. But now she explains that she read those books for so long because the first person narrative tricked her into sympathizing with a bratty heroine. Comic books were a tremendous obsession last summer, less so this summer, and they may be gone by next summer.

When I was pregnant, my husband used to fantasize about having a baby who would sit on the floor between us, and all three of us would read in peace and quiet. I had babysat when younger, and laughed at his fantasy. Yet it came true, faster than I thought it would, and now I fantasize about Hannah coming to visit us in our old age, and the three of us continuing what we often do now: sitting in our respective chairs reading alone and together.

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