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Catching the Book Habit

ByAdam Callis

I wasn’t a big reader as a kid. I read a few of the Great Illustrated Classics, because they had big font and pictures on every other page (Call of the Wild, Black Beauty, and King Arthur were my favorites). I also read AR books in school for points to win prizes. And thanks in part to an annual Bible quiz competition that our church participated in, I did some Bible reading as well. But one thing that motivated me on this last piece was that I wanted to imitate my older brother, who quietly developed a habit of reading 3 chapters a day in his Bible.

Imitation is the name of the game in a lot of things, including reading. The saying is true: much more is caught than taught. I remember reflecting on this principle years ago when I read James K.A. Smith’s book You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit. Speaking of how habits connect to our hearts, he writes:

It is crucial for us to recognize that our ultimate loves, longings, desires, and cravings are learned. And because love is a habit, our hearts are calibrated through imitating exemplars and being immersed in practices that, over time, index our hearts to a certain end.

Photo by Declan Sun on Unsplash

I always liked the idea of being a reader, and I admired people who did read. But the love of reading didn’t fully develop in me until after I formed the habit.

Now as a father, reading aloud every night has been one of the ways I’ve tried to instill a love for reading into my kids through habit. Reading at night works well because we’re already in the habit of winding down and going to bed each night, and I’ve found one of the best ways to make a habit stick is to attach it to another habit that’s already fully formed. But while I plan to keep reading aloud with them for as long as possible, I’m also hoping to gradually see them choose to spend time reading on their own, especially as they grow older and more competent in their independent reading.

Thinking about this caused me to reflect on my own reading habits, and as I started doing this, I realized that most of my independent reading time was happening either sporadically throughout the day or in the evening after the kids had gone to sleep. So here I was, plowing through book after book, but my kids were rarely seeing any of it.

So I changed some of my habits to make my reading more visible. One thing I did was to put my laptop away at night and keep my current book on my bedside table instead. Then one night, I noticed that our oldest daughter (who apparently plans to sleep in our bed the rest of her life) had put a unicorn-themed chapter book on my bedside table. One night at bedtime, I walked in and saw her sitting up in the bed reading. And the most interesting part is this: she can barely read. I know this because we homeschool and I do a reading exercise with her several times a week. Yet, here she was, reading this book, because she said wanted to have a nighttime book to read like me.

Then, a few nights later, I found our 8-year-old son doing the same thing in his bed. He then asked me for recommendations on some books for him to read at night, so we picked up a Nate the Great mystery book at the library. When I shared these observations with my wife, she told me she’d seen our oldest son drawing at night with a lamp under his covers. A few nights later, I found him pulling chapter books off our kitchen bookshelf to find something to read. They were books that I had put there months before for that very purpose—to spark curiosity. I ended up giving him a copy of The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane that I had found one day in a community book-box outside H.G. Hill.

But nowhere in the course of all these events did I ever suggest to the kids that they should start reading books at night before bed. All I did was change my own habit to make it more visible. The rest happened organically.

Meanwhile, our daughter is still reading the same unicorn book, and every night when I glance over, I see that she’s still on the same page. I have no idea how much she’s getting, and I don’t say anything unless she asks for help on a word (which she has only done once, and it was the word the). Yet, she’s kept the habit, and she seems to have sparked it in her two older brothers as well. Comprehension or not, she’s been “showing up to the page” every night.

And that counts for a lot in this life.

Adam Callis
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