If You Have Nothing To Do This Summer – Just Read!

Posted: June 10, 2019

Curtain raiser to the kid’s classics and literature, and outlook on the declining habit of reading and reminiscing summer readings

“You have been a friend. That itself is a great thing. I wove my web for you because I like you after all, what’s life anyway? We’re born, we live a little while, and we die. A spider’s life can’t be something of the mess, with all this trapping and eating flies. By helping you, perhaps I was trying to lift my life a trifle. Heaven knows anyone’s life can stand a little of that.”

Those enchanted words from the famous “Charlotte’s Web” by E.B White fell on my ear like magic droplets when my teacher narrated the stanza when I was a kid. Thus, began my never-ending love for books, especially literature n classics. Eventually, it ended up me collecting literary arts, starting from the mystical Wizard of Oz to the incredible Black Beauty. The magical Malgudi stories by R.K. Narayan carved up my childhood. Two decades later my bookshelf became the proud owner of mesmerizing classics of Shakespearean dramas to the adventure tales of Mark Twain, Thomas Hardy to Dickens, Jane Austen to Agatha Christie and goes never-ending list.

Nevertheless, few years amidst it has been noted that there has been a tremendous decline in kids taking a keen interest in reading!! Far are the days when our little ones are embracing nights with the bedtime story books. The monotonous television entertainments and computers replace books. Thus, blocking doors of the creative world of imaginations and the little brains. Eventually, summer is at its best, and this would be the best time to inculcate the habit of reading, especially in kids.

Many cities conduct lit fest predominantly to indulge or create an awareness of text. Recently in such a lit fest that was held in Hyderabad, authors and writers enthusiastically shared their knowledge and interest towards this field to the little ones through reading and other workshops.

A few years back entertainment mainly consisted of reading and writing apart from outdoor games in young kids, thus involuntarily indulging them in the basic routine of reading. Nowadays it is ironically noted that schools have developed the habit of completing the respective textbook portion in a hurry and in that hurry unintentionally may be, thus taking away the precious half an hour library time that pops out once in a week.

Nevertheless, its vacation around and the sun is spitting fire. Apparently if you have no vacation tour or outdoor plan it would be the best time to grab a book and relax. And if you are a “new reader in town” especially children, and in a dilemma regarding what to read? Then a few books recommended are the Malgudi stories by R.K Narayan. But there are five most inspiring books that I would suggest and also made my daughter read are, Charlotte’s Web by E.B White, the Black Beauty by Anna Sewell, Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum, Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll and finally last and the best, the jungle book by Rudyard Kipling.

There are a vast range of classics that are written as an eternal gift to the literary society and the book lovers, it is nothing but the elixir to quench the thirst for reading. So when my daughter asked me to read a book for her at night I immediately grab a book and go with the flow, and when she asks “Why do you make me read?” I say- “All about reading is that it makes you realize what you are and what you want.”

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