My mother will gift my son and other kids in the family with books when it comes to birthdays or Christmas, which is fine by my wife and I. My son reads a good bit already, so books are welcome. However, it is pretty evident that not everyone does read or appreciate books as much as they should.
Recently, my son had a friend over to had out one afternoon and my wife had told them that they couldn’t play on electronics the whole time, but had to do something else. A little while later my wife checked in on them and they had several books open and sprawled out on the floor, with notebooks and drawings, as they were planning on how to Survive a Zombie Attack!
My wife emailed my mother to tell her how much her books are appreciated here and how they were used that one particular day, and this is the reply my mother gave.
I can’t thank you enough for sharing this story. The reason I like to give the boys books is that they meant so much to me as a child. We didn’t have money to buy books but I used the school and later the children’s libraries as my sources. I can’t recall my parents ever taking me to a library or a book store but I had wonderful teachers who inspired me. I think I would be a very different person if I hadn’t had books back then. I became extremely curious and envious of the world outside my experience. I found beauty when there was precious little in the mill village where we lived and I was able to participate in someone else’s imagination, which still is an insatiable hunger in me. So, to make a long story short, I would have loved owning books when I was a child and I think every child should own them whether they choose to read them or not. (Books are not just objects but ideas!!)
By the way, the friend that was over admittedly doesn’t read much, however his mother called the next day to get the titles of the books they were using because he wanted to go to the store and get them too.
