This article was originally published in 2017.

The art of discussion is very important. One of the ways to foster discussion is to read something together which might spark a conversation around the dinner table. But it is also important to think about reading whole books, creating a reading culture in your home, and giving you something easy and common to talk about with your children.

But, once again, the primary question is why is that important.

Good and varied literature is important for personal development. An understanding of justice and beauty, right and wrong, sacrifice and greed, is going to depend on what the student encounters in his environment. He needs to have experienced these things, in some way, to think about them.

It is to this reality that Plato directs himself in the Republic, when he tells us that if the soul has in it good, true, beautiful, noble, and heroic images, it will become like those things. The old adage ‘You are what you eat,’ could be changed truthfully to say ‘You are what you see and hear.' The images in the imagination and memory become a part of the soul that affects all the rest of life.

Further, Plato explains that since whatever is true is also beautiful, an appreciation of the beautiful prepares the way for an appreciation of the true. If children love the beautiful they will love the truth, as truth , when they are older. Thus, not only in terms of the moral order, but even in terms of intellectual formation, fostering the fine arts is important.

A love of the beautiful and true, and a corresponding distaste for what is ugly and false, can help children order their souls.  One way we do this is to give the students high and noble objects at every stage of formation.  We can give them heroic examples in the lives of those around us, in the saints, and in great literature. There is a reason for the fact that loving the beautiful and hating the ugly prepares one to love the truth as truth. This reason is that the good, the true, and the beautiful are all aspects of one and the same reality. If something is good, it is beautiful, for it will necessarily have the qualities that make something beautiful (integrity, proportion and clarity). Similarly, if something is true, it is beautiful, for it will similarly have all the qualities that make something beautiful. So our curricula need to include objects of beauty to move the heart, as well as clear truths to move the mind. All the fine arts, and particularly great literature, do this; they move the heart and prepare the mind for the truth. They make it easier for the person reading such things to become virtuous.

Now, of course, one becomes virtuous by doing virtuous acts; for example, one becomes temperate by refraining from too much food, or by eating as much as one should even if not interested, in other words, by acting temperately. But most of us have to be led to such actions. Good example and instruction can lead one to virtue, as can suitable punishment for wrongdoing. One can experience these directly, or one can experience them indirectly, through literature. Such measures will not cause virtue, in and of themselves, but they can dispose one to virtue. Suitable representations in the fine arts, especially in literature, also produce a disposition to virtue.

In the reading of a good story, there is the delight in recognizing and learning that is common effect of all the artistic imitations. We enjoy, are delighted by, the representations of reality we see in paintings, or hear in symphonies. But there are also, especially for the young, further effects. The experience of the reader is extended and enriched, vicariously, without the painful and destructive consequences that often come with lived experience. Also, from the way in which the objects are represented, the reader can be led to regard them in a true light. The imitator has an advantage over nature here. He can bring out and make evident what, in the nature of things, is inward and hidden; he can make things look like what they are. The heroine of the story can be beautiful and kind, and the hero both brave and handsome. Their external appearance and actions match their internal character. To be sure, this does not give knowledge, but only right estimation.  But this follows the natural order in the formation of mind and character. Just as disposition comes before habit, so does discovery come before judgment.  Good literature gives the student experience, and shows him in an incarnational way, what virtue is and what it looks like.

This is one of the reasons why saint stories are so important; the children learn from the saints, who were real people, living in this same world we inhabit, what is possible for a man to do, what heroic choices he is capable of. They also learn what those heroic choices are, which is helpful when they face such choices themselves, even on a smaller scale.  Fairy tales and just generally good and noble stories are also important for the same reason. They all provide the children with the right images to promote a true understanding of reality, with examples of the choices between good and evil men face daily.

The kind of reading we are interested in helps give the children an understanding of the whole and a clear perception of the end of life. It fits with the goal of the education we are providing. We know that education should equip one to order the whole of his life, and an understanding of the end, with a reasonable grasp of the parts, is necessary to do that.   This is freeing, and it's why this education, classical education, is also called liberal education. It comes from the Latin ‘liberare’: ‘to free’. Liberal education makes a man free, because it makes him able to order his own life. Further, such a man is able to be wise, because to be wise is to see how each particular choice is ordered to the end. When we call someone wise and ask him for advice, it is because he sees better than we do how the choices we make will help or hinder the achievement of the end we desire.



I’ve reread The Lord of the Rings with my grandson not long ago, and have been struck with the use of the term ‘wise’ as it is found in the trilogy. Gandalf is wise, Aragorn is wise, Elrond is wise. This is not because they are always right, though they are often are, or because they see the future, but because the judgments they make are for the good of the whole of Middle Earth. They have the principles which make right judgments possible, if not infallible. Their decisions about where and when to go, and what to do, are all based on a clear understanding of what the true good is and what is most likely to achieve it. Further, they see that the preservation of Middle Earth, important as it is, is not the greatest good. If there is no way to save Middle Earth from the forces of evil, it is better to die with Middle Earth than to succumb to the evil. The hobbits, whom I love, are not among the wise. They are remarkably resistant to evil, and are good and obviously important to the story. The four companions, Frodo, Sam, Merry and Pippin, develop wisdom as the story progresses, but hobbits in general are not considered to be among the wise. That is because their view is too limited. They think primarily in terms of the Shire and their own affairs, and even with regard to those affairs they don’t have the long view.

Good literature helps prepares one for the long view.  But the emphasis is on good. Long ago Aristotle defined a good story. He said that it is an imitation of action and life ( Poetics 1450a16), and an imitation of the agent of the action for the sake of that action. (ibid. 1450 b4)

Now, stories are not concerned with life the way history is. The difference between the two is like the difference between a photograph of a scene and a painting of the same scene.  Both are likenesses, but in the painting the artist shows the viewer a particular aspect of, or an insight about, the object that he is imitating. By his rendering of the object he makes the viewer see what he sees. A photograph, by contrast, is simply a reproduction of the outward appearance of a thing.

"The historian differs from the poet [the storyteller] by speaking of what has actually occurred, whereas the poet speaks of the kinds of things which are likely to occur. In view of this, poetry is more philosophical and more serious than history; for poetry speaks rather of what is universally the case, whereas history speaks of particular events which actually occurred." ( Poetics 1451b1-10)

History is particular, literature is universal. G.K.Chesterton says it another way: a good poet, or storyteller, is able to give his readers "a glorious glimpse into the possibilities of existence." ( Autobiography , The Collected Works of GKC)

But those possibilities have to be possibilities, that is, they must be consistent with reality. "If you draw a giraffe, you must draw him with a long neck. If, in your bold creative way, you hold yourself free to draw him with a short neck, you will find you are not free to draw a giraffe." ( Orthodoxy , by G. K. Chesterton, pp. 243-245 )

The universal truths with which the storyteller concerns himself have to do, most of all, with the moral order. Since stories are about human actions, and human actions are either good or bad, then the stories are going to have to portray the characters' actions in such a context.

In A Landscape with Dragons , Michael O'Brien says: "The sun may be green and the fish may fly through the air, but however fantastical the imagined world, there is retained in it a faithfulness to the moral order of our own universe."

This is what we want to accomplish with our children. We want to establish a reading culture in our homes, because we want to give them an intellectual diet of things that are true, good and beautiful. This is the primary reason we want them to read. If they are reading materials that don’t ennoble them, they would be better off not reading.  This doesn’t mean that all they should read are saint stories, but it does mean, in my opinion, that they should not be reading Harry Potter or Percy Jackson.

The primary problem with Harry Potter is the attitude toward authority, even good and worthy authority. Harry and his friends regularly break curfew, trespass in forbidden areas, lie and generally ignore the injunctions of their teachers. Out of this disrespect for authority comes great good for Harry, for the school, and even for the world. Additionally, the friendship of the three primary characters, Harry, Hermione and Ron begins when Hermione lies to get the other two out of trouble. And the issue of the mandrake roots is very telling. The mandrake root is necessary to concoct a potion that will release those turned to stone from the spell. The mandrake root is a baby when acquired, develops acne as it matures, and climbs into other pots. Then they are cut up to make the potion. It is only because our society accepts abortion that such an image for the mandrake root can be used. In a culture that valued babies, it would never be acceptable to have the root have the form of a baby and then be cut up into a potion.

The problem with Percy Jackson is that it destroys the value of the Greek mythology.  The Greek mythology is fascinating largely due to the difference between it and anything else at the time. There is a real attempt to understand causes and to be virtuous. Compared to our Catholic/Christian culture it looks paltry, but compared to any of the other pagan cultures it is clearly noble. Even if you are not doing a direct comparison, you can see in the Iliad, for example, the real authority of Zeus, and the true piety of Achilles. In Percy Jackson the gods are reduced to the role of amoral super heroes. The value of the stories is lost.

All great literature is moving, it moves the heart toward the good in a way the direct teaching of the truth, especially initially, and especially in the young, often does not. Since these truths in a story are encountered in a concrete, incarnational format that engages both mind and heart, there is less inclination to reject the teaching. The reader is participating in the journey and learning with the characters, so he's learning the lessons that life teaches, and he's learning them in a non-confrontational mode. In many people there's a resistance to just being told what to do. Even if one does what one is told, the act of obedience is not then the act of the whole person. Remember, obedience is no good, unless you have their heart. Reading the right books, reading lots of them, and reading them well will help our children to develop hearts turned to God and open to the best kind of obedience, willing obedience. A story that ignores these truths about literature is damaging.

So, how do we develop a reading culture in our homes? The first thing to do, and in some ways the most important, because it is foundational, is to have read alouds be part of your family life. Children learn by imitation. If reading aloud good literature is important to you, it will be to the children; if you are really interested in what you are reading, the children will be, too. They will learn to appreciate good stories, and they will develop the sense that this is something we, as a family, do.

I have often found that if a child is resistant to reading, a parent’s involvement can make a crucial difference. So reading something together, as I suggest with the read alouds, or starting a book club for members of the community (but staying involved as the moderator), or developing a list of your favorite books and giving it to your child as a gift, something you would really like to share with him, can help.

Recently, one of my moms was telling me that her child was grumbling about extra summer reading. The mom had asked me what would best boost the child’s SAT scores and I told her that besides taking practice tests, my experience was that reading good books, with a complex sentence structure and excellent vocabulary, would be the best bet. The mom had passed that on to the child, who didn’t like the sound of it. I asked to speak to the student, and told him that I had some favorite books and I really wanted to share them with him. I told him that I was interested in his reactions to the stories I loved and I wondered which he would like best. I asked if, when he finished a story, he would let me know, and I said that I would be making an effort to reread those books this summer, too, so that they would be fresh in my mind when he talked to me about them. He told me that sounded great, he has already emailed me to tell me about the first story, and his mom said he is reading with good will. I think that is a technique that can often work well. Now, it’s always easier to share what you love. And it is really hard to pass on what you don’t have – so, if you haven’t been a reader, do your best to develop the habit yourself.

Along those lines, it’s easier to develop a reading culture in your home if everyone reads. I decided when my kids were young to have directed reading time. This is my title for the regular, daily reading time spent reading a book I have chosen for my child. He is welcome to read anything else he wants (within reason) for the rest of the day, but during this time, he reads what I have picked for him.

When the children are little, and just developing reading fluency, the directed reading time is to help them do just that. I will have an early reader read three times a day, at first for five minutes each time, from a book that is actually below his reading level. There is a place for challenge in directed reading, but it comes after fluency has been acquired. People only get better at reading by practicing reading, and so I think you need to incorporate regular reading time in your child’s day. And five minutes, three times, is easier than one long fifteen minute period. When five minutes becomes easy, make it ten minutes three times a day, and when that becomes easy move to fifteen. When that is easy, the child is usually ready to move to two half hours, or one full hour. That’s your target. Each child should, in my opinion, read for one hour of directed reading each day. In our house this was usually in addition to any reading the student may be doing for history. (I say usually, because I have had a reluctant reader, and asking for an hour of reading beyond the reading required in history would just have been too much.)

When the children get older, this directed reading time provides a place to introduce the classics. One of my children had gotten to the Hardy Boys stage, and seemed to be stuck. I suggested several times that if he liked Hardy Boys, he would like Sherlock Holmes, but he looked at my very large book, with very small print, and said, “No, thanks, Mom.”  Finally, I decided that Sherlock Holmes was going to be part of his directed reading time. So, that night after dinner, I handed him the book and told him he could read it for an hour. Every ten minutes of that hour, he asked me if his time was up. At the end of the hour I asked if he had liked the book. He said, “No,” and I said, “That’s too bad, because you’re going to be reading it for awhile.”

The following night, after dinner I handed my son the same book, and he sat down to read it. This time, however, he didn’t ask me every ten minutes if his time was up. In fact, when I told him his hour was up, he said, “Thanks, Mom,” and kept reading. He kept reading until bed time, and when I got up in the morning, he was up before me, reading Sherlock Holmes.

I tell you this, both as an illustration of what I mean by directed reading time, and an encouragement to you to go ahead and introduce your children to the classics. Classics are classic in part because people like them, and our children will like them if they persist in reading them. Occasionally, I admit, they don’t like something we have picked out for them to read, but that’s life, and everyone has to do a certain number of things that are just good for them. My own experience is that if you do something that is good for you often enough, even though you may not have started out liking it, your liking for it will grow as the action is repeated.

Now, I did find, when I first started directed reading time in my home, that if I wasn’t also reading during that time, less reading was going on. When it was clear that this was reading time, and we were all going to read, the children were more willing to read. It’s the virtue of modeling, again, and using the desire we all have to do what the community does. I did find, once the reading culture was established in my house that it wasn’t so essential that I read when the children did, or that everyone read together at the same time. But it helped a great deal when they were young.

Another important consideration if you are trying to establish a reading culture in your home is the pace of life. When we started homeschooling I was dumbfounded to find how much easier life became, not in every way, but in real and important ways. I found my household was more serene in general, the children did chores (which was good for them and for me), the baby got uninterrupted naps, we started going to daily Mass, and the children began to read for fun. Until then they hadn’t, and I couldn’t figure out why, but once they came home I realized that it was because their lives had been too hectic. Reading requires a certain peace, a reflective attitude, and our lifestyle just hadn’t contained those elements.

When you are beginning to develop the reading culture in your home, it’s helpful to determine what is a reasonable amount to ask the various children to read during their directed reading time. You are building to an hour a day of directed reading time for every child. You have to start where the student is, so with young children (but children who have already achieved minimal fluency – if they haven’t use the method I already mentioned), or children who do not have a habit of reading, you should start small. Have them read for ten minutes twice a day, or fifteen minutes. Increase that gradually. I always found that it was better to give them a number of pages to read, then a time, because that time might be spent staring at the page but not reading.

So I would start by having my student read for twenty minutes consecutively on a good day (or for a young student ten minutes, or even five). I would take the number of pages read in that time frame as a base line. Say that Johnny read ten pages in twenty minutes, and that he was not an eager reader. I would ask him to read five pages, twice a day, until that was comfortable, and be confident that I was asking for what amounted to twenty minutes of directed reading time. I would gradually up the number of pages, and I would explain that as he became a better reader he would be able to read for longer stretches.

I recommend that there be variety in the books that are read for directed reading time. This calls for prudence. I think it is very important, when you have a reluctant reader, to give him choices. Have a shelf or stack of ten books of different genres, and let him choose what he would like to read. Pay attention to what is most interesting to him and then look for more books in that genre. It can really make a difference. You can have a family story, an adventure story, a fantasy story, a biography, an historical fiction, a history book, an animal story, an almanac, a nature book, and a ‘way things work’ book. When he chooses one of those replace it with another of the same genre.  Directed reading time, is, at first, a place to develop the habit of reading and you want to figure out what is the biggest draw. Redwall has worked for countless children, as have the Narnian Chronicles.

Later on, once the habit of reading is established, you should encourage the children to move outside their comfort zones and try a different genre. You should also, at that point, include three levels among the recommendations. There should be some that are easy so as to be relaxing and to continue to develop fluency, some that are at the child’s comfort level so as to develop appropriate reading skills, and some that are challenging to expand the horizons.

While, at first, you assign a number of pages and/or a specific amount of time, as the children develop into reading, you will want to make sure you work toward and facilitate a significant continuous time for reading. That is, once people are good readers they should read a story for as long as they can given their other responsibilities.  It’s better to read for a solid hour, than two thirty minute periods.

The reason for this is that a story teaches, but teaches as experience teaches: concretely. A story is a whole with a beginning, middle and end. You don’t grasp a story until you have the whole. So the intellectual truth to be gained is apparent only after the whole experience and by reflection on it. Chapters of a novel, or the acts of a play are often relatively meaningless when wrenched from the whole. Certainly, any judgements made about the parts or the characters as one is going through the story will have to be reexamined when the story is complete. (I was recently talking to a friend who just finished Kristen Lavernsdatter . He said his estimation of the characters changed radically from part to part and it wasn’t until he finished the work that he actually understood them.) Further, you won’t grasp the story unless you ‘live’ the story. Because of its nature two of the most important aspects of reading a story are thus lack of interruption and total immersion. These two aspects go together; if the story is interrupted the reader can't be immersed in it.

Since a story read effectively must move us, we must let it work on us. We must make ourselves open to it. It's not possible to do that when you are constantly moving in and out of the story to discuss, analyze, or prepare for the upcoming chapters. That encourages a kind of skepticism.  For this reason, Mortimer Adler's first piece of advice for reading stories in How to Read a Book , and it's mine as well from personal experience, is to read the story quickly and with total immersion. He says the ideal is to read a literary work in one sitting, but since that is not always possible "the ideal should be approximated by compressing the reading of a good story into as short a time as feasible. Otherwise you will forget what happened, the unity of the plot will escape you, and you will be lost."

He also says, and this resonates with me, "The tremendous pleasure that can come from reading Shakespeare, for instance, was spoiled for generations of high school students who were forced to go through Julius Caesar , As You Like It , or Hamlet , scene by scene, looking up all the strange words in a glossary and studying all the scholarly footnotes. As a result, they have never really read the Shakespearean play. By the time they had reached the end, they had forgotten the beginning and lost sight of the whole.”

There is a place for a more in depth study of a story. But it comes after the story has been seen as a story, a whole, and has, so to speak, been lived. Also, it comes when the student is ready to analyze. Then one moves to the next level; he is ready to fruitfully analyze, categorize, and criticize. CS Lewis, in An Experiment in Criticism , agrees. "The necessary condition of all good reading is "to get ourselves out of the way"; we do not help the young to do this by forcing them to keep on expressing opinions." (Page 93)

It is for these reasons that study guides are generally not a good idea for stories. Let the children learn from their experience and from the context of the story, as we do in real life.

Another word of caution, especially at first: don’t stop the children from reading easy books. Many a mom has made the mistake of saying, “Don’t read that, it’s a baby book. I have seen you read far harder books so I know you can.” That might be true, but it might also be that though he can read harder books, they are really hard for him and then the reading is not fun. It’s work. It’s like me reading Latin. I can do it, but not for too long. I am not fluent in Latin, I have to translate every word into English and that is a long and hard process. The student who does not have reading fluency is having to sound out, and break down all the hard words. That is hard work and it’s not fun. Let him develop his fluency, which means developing his recognition vocabulary. And there are lovely, really good, easier books. CS Lewis says that any definition of literature that excludes Beatrix Potter is false. So reading Beatrix Potter is reading real literature. In my house we also enjoyed the Tin-Tin stories, for example, which can grab the attention of an earlier reader. Of course, the really early reader is going to be reading Amelia Bedelia, and Frog and Toad. I am here thinking of a somewhat later reader. The reason I so like the idea of having a shelf with a variety of reading materials picked for this particular student is that the student will generally find the right level for himself among the books.

I want to say, too, that you should not worry about being relevant.  Generally, not exclusively, but generally, children’s books written before 1965 are well done, and you can rely on the author following the ‘rules’ of good writing mentioned by Aristotle. After 1965 it is much chancier. So don’t think that it’s best to look for ‘modern’ books that will be familiar and speak to children ‘raised in today’s culture’. Remember that reading is an important way that children learn about reality, and the reality you are interested in is the reality of the true, the good and the beautiful. Much modern storytelling involves the grotesque, and the protagonists will lie, and eschew authority. You don’t want your children to think that is how the world works. It doesn’t, or at least it doesn’t work well that way.

Also, once you have established the habit of reading, make sure to include books for the children that expose them to significant vocabulary and more complex sentence structure. This will help them learn to think more precisely, as we use the words we know when we think, so more words and more determinate words, used in more complex ways, will help the children think in those terms, and with those connections.

I think all of this entails mom getting to know the good book lists; I used to have some beside my bed and I would read from them a few minutes before going to sleep. I got to recognize good authors that way, and then I would go to library book sales and pick them up cheaply. Some good lists are those in DYOCC, our syllabi (the literature lists in the K-5 syllabi can be very helpful), Honey for  Child’s Heart , A Landscape with Dragons , WRTR for early trade books, F&F readers, Books Children Love , 1000 Good Books by John Senior, Books that Build Character by Kilpatrick, Moral Compass by Bennet, Tending the Heart of Virtue by Gurion, Bethlehem books, Catholic Books: Crown and Foresight Editions if you can find them (but not for lots of money).

Do your children enjoy reading?

What has most helped your children read for fun?

What are you favorite children’s books? I get to start: The Book of Three, the Narnia Chronicles, Louisa May Alcott, Father Finn, Francis and Claire, Saints of Assisi, Swallows and Amazons, Dr. Doolittle, Mary Poppins, Dragonspell, The Church Mouse series, Tolkien. For the older child, Shadow of His Wings, Jane Austen, PG Wodehouse, James Herriot. There are lots of others, these just come to mind.