We Did It! We Read Nearly 300 New Kids’ Books

My daughter learned to read this year. I’m feeling proud of her and sorry for myself.

It happened so quickly — too quickly, I say. When she started Grade 1 in September, this developmental milestone felt so very far away. Then next thing I knew, she was the ravenous reader from I Want to Read All the Books, Debbie Ridpath Ohi’s story of a little girl who wants to know everything.

The kids and I read Ohi’s latest book in the spring, as we were working through our goal of reading every picture book released in Canada in 2024.

Back then, bedtime reading was my thing. I took it incredibly seriously, keeping our shelves fully stocked with the best books around, and eventually pitching an ambitious reading project that offers a comprehensive overview of Canada’s picture book market.

It was a massive undertaking, and completely unnecessary, but the kids were as thrilled by the concept as I was, apart from the spreadsheet to track our progress.

The books, though? We all loved the books. Every other week, a stack of holds would be delivered to my local Vancouver Public Library branch, 10 or 20 at a time. I’d come home from work with a fresh batch of new releases; my children would cheer. It was deeply fulfilling.

I love to read alone, but I forgot how much I love to read aloud until my children came along. They’re so inquisitive. Nobody — not even my wonderful Tyee colleagues — can ask a tough question like these two, and nothing is quite as rewarding as answering each one to their satisfaction. This project enabled some deep conversations and made for all manner of memorable moments.

I’ve touched on a couple in previous essays. The Green Baby Swing, by the great Thomas King, set the stage for a bittersweet chat about loss, and a moment of feeling my feelings in front of my children. I’ll never forget that.

Indigenous authors like Andrea Fritz, author of Raven Gets Tricked and Crow Helps a Friend, taught me to read without fear of the words I don’t know, which allowed me to model the process of muddling through without shame for my daughter. She was struggling with confidence then.

Seven months later, we’re just about finished. There were 300 books to be read in November, and nine that I haven’t been able to borrow. I want to say it’s not for lack of trying, but it is. A few have proven tough to find — four are still on order, after all this time; the other five have since arrived, but the passion’s gone out of the project. I’ve let the holds lapse and accepted the fines.

My partner insists this is typical for me. I tend to lose momentum with the finish line in sight; I leave a trail of open tasks the way banana slugs leave slime. No argument here. But this time, it isn’t my fault — it’s my daughter’s, for arriving as an independent reader.

Suddenly, I wasn’t the only person doing the reading at bedtime

In January, as we hit 100 books, my daughter did the same at school, becoming the first in her class to be honoured for logging 100 books read. She got a gold certificate, a standing ovation and the dopamine that comes from validation.

After that, confidence wasn’t a problem. At bedtime, she snatched the book out of my hands — Nadine Robert’s The Walk of the Field Mouse — and read it aloud to her four-year-old brother and me.

He didn’t appreciate switching things up, nor his sister’s refusal to show him the pictures. I didn’t appreciate being replaced as the reader — I want to read all the books — but I didn’t lash out like him. After all, I’m a grown-up.

To keep the peace and for no other reason, I kept the next book for myself.

Spider in the Well by Jess Hannigan is the story of a newsboy who confronts the greedy spider that’s been living in the local wishing well, getting rich off the townspeople’s wishes.

Hannigan, from Hamilton, Ont., is one to watch. Spider in the Well was the best Canadian picture book of 2024, to my mind, an auspicious debut from our next great auteur. Most picture books, including the pair I’ve authored and which are making their way through the publishing pipeline, are collaborations between an author and illustrator. Celebrated Canadian children’s author Robert Munsch has long worked with illustrator Michael Martchenko, for instance.

Occasionally, though, you get an author who is also an illustrator: Maurice Sendak, Sandra Boynton, Theodor Seuss Geisel, and so on — a true double threat with a singular vision.

Canada has several established auteurs. Standout examples who published a project last year include Marie Louise-Gay’s Walking Trees, about a city girl who visits a forest and asks for a tree for her birthday. She names the tree George and takes him for walks in a wagon, bringing shade to her neighbours and colour to the greenless, urban landscape.

I adored Jack Wong’s All That Grows, another book about the wonder and value of greenery, from the trees of East Van to the weeds in our garden. Wong’s writing is patient, poetic and childlike; his dreamy pastels are pure magic.

Frostfire, by Georgian Bay’s Elly MacKay, is a sweet sibling tale with a touch of the surreal, from the mythic snow dragon at the story’s heart to MacKay’s phosphorescent paper diorama art.

Julie Flett’s Let’s Go! is a blast that had my son screaming “haw êkwa! Let’s go!” for several weeks. It’s a wonderful example of what an author can accomplish with very few words, as is Thao Lam’s fully wordless One Giant Leap. Lam seems to have saved all her words for her next project, Everybelly, which came out this past April.

I’m in awe of these auteurs; I loved each of their books.

Even still, I liked Hannigan’s more. Her eye-catching, colourful art style is modern and maximalist, but strangely nostalgic. Her story is wholly original; somehow, it reads like a classic. It’s silly (hilarious, truly), but dripping with radical subtext. Her work is so good.

As my son fell asleep one night, I pre-ordered her follow-up, The Bear Out There, set to be published the following spring. I brought it home a month ago, excited to read it aloud to the kids.

My daughter saw it, brought it to her room, and shut the door. Later, she told me how funny it was. Then she logged it on her personal list of books she’s read herself. A separate tracking sheet, mind you, from the family spreadsheet that I’d devised at the outset of our 300-book project.

I read it to my son that night while she read something else. Even that took some convincing. Now that his sister is doing her own thing, my son only wants to read Pokemon reference guides. Nowadays, there are over 1,000 known Pokemon species, not including variants and regional forms.

My daughter’s momentum this year has been stunning. In March, she hit 200 books on her list, and by May, she was over 300.

She’s moved past the beginner books, primers and picture books read by her father. Nowadays, she reads chapter books, fat graphic novels with hundreds of pages: Dog Man, Captain Underpants and Cat Kid Comic Club. Whatever Ben Clanton’s got cooking.

She loves reading independently. She’s so proud, and so am I — proud to have raised an insatiable reader, and floored by the progress she’s made since November.

But part of me wishes she’d slow down a little. I still want to be the one who gets to read all the books to her. For just over half-a-decade, I looked forward to bedtime, not only for the rest I sorely needed but the ritual it seems I needed more.

I’m already missing the days when we’d huddle together to read every night, days that I expected to be years and years long, when two children, a big book and sometimes the cat would all fit in the same lap, enraptured by the same book.

I know I’m not the first young dad to mourn the march of time. All through the early years, when I was underslept and struggling, well-rested friends of mine — fellow parents — would offer the same moony elegy: cherish these moments. It all goes so fast.

Stuff like that is hard to hear and harder to believe when you’re raising two kids under two, your whole life’s an ordeal, and you find yourself nostalgic for the days before kids, when life felt meaningless and lonely but at least you could sleep in on weekends.

I get it now. My friends were right: it goes by faster than I’ve been able to comprehend.

There are new joys, of course. My daughter’s a writer now, just like her dad. She passes me cute little notes over dinner and messages under her door when she’s mad. For Father’s Day, she made me a picture book. She wrote all the words, did her own illustrations. My kid’s an auteur. No surprise.

Nostalgic for November, I asked if she’d like me to read it aloud. Not a chance. She took it away just for asking, and read it to me.

Then she logged it on her list.