Books were my constant companions as a child. I spent much of my childhood and teenage years lost in them; more often than not they were preferable company to kids my age. They kept me out of trouble and gave me a private world to explore.
My bedroom sat at the end of a hallway, directly across from my parents’ room, and the bookcase was right there at the end of that hall. It was perfectly placed. Inside lived a full set of encyclopedias, collections of classic literature, great speeches, and poetry. By the time I was grown, many of those volumes bore dog-eared pages, penciled notes, and loose bindings from being read over and over. I would pull a book into my room, curl up in bed, or settle on the floor against the wall and read for hours. That bookcase felt like my own treasure chest.
I learned about the world—geography, distant cultures, and animals I would never see in person. I grew close to Lincoln through the weight of the Gettysburg Address. Thomas Moore warned me about unexpected emptiness. Poets and great writers across the ages offered counsel, caution, and hope, helping me imagine a life beyond endless circuits in a mall parking lot on Friday night.
There was even a King James Bible on the shelf. At first it read like a foreign language, but spending time with it taught me patience for people and texts that don’t immediately make sense. In short, that bookcase was a dear friend throughout my youth.
I wanted my daughter Katy to have the same love of books. Brady, my oldest, reads now and then—he’s not as voracious as I was at his age, but he will pick up a hefty book and work through it over days. Katy, though, has always been lively and rarely sat long enough to read for pleasure. She’s an excellent reader and reads aloud with expression, which brings characters to life, but she never chose to read just for fun. I worried she didn’t yet understand what books could offer—until yesterday.
We were working on history using The Story of Our World. Since we’d taken a holiday break, I decided to read aloud from the history book until we reached our previous stopping point. The text reads like a story rather than a dry sequence of facts, so revisiting it felt like watching a favorite movie again.
Katy and I curled up on the couch. “Ooh! I remember that!” she said now and then, sometimes predicting what would come next or quizzing me to see if I remembered as much as she did. The book made history feel alive in a way I hadn’t experienced in a textbook before.
Over the break I had ordered a history encyclopedia the textbook author recommended. The teacher’s guide references pages in that encyclopedia for photos, maps, day-in-the-life illustrations, and extra context. I had hoped the colorful pages might spark something of my own childhood in Katy.
After reading a few chapters aloud, I paused and said, “Let me show you something about what we just read,” and brought out the encyclopedia. When I opened it to the first recommended page, Katy sat up straighter. “Where did that book come from?” she asked. I explained I had ordered it over Christmas and showed her a bright, illustrated map of Egypt that made the Nile’s flooding and the surrounding land easy to understand—the lush riverbanks contrasted with the drier outskirts, the marshy Delta, and the irony of Upper Egypt being in the south while Lower Egypt sits to the north.
She stopped me with a shout of excitement—“GO back! I saw something!”—and that was the beginning of an hour-long exploration. We moved from one fascinating entry to another: the Statue of Liberty (what it’s made of, how tall it is, why it was given to the United States), famine in Africa, life in a medieval castle, Martin Luther King Jr., the KKK and segregation, kings and queens of England, the Great Wall of China, and the Cold War. At one point I pulled up President Reagan’s “Tear Down This Wall” speech on my phone while we read about the Berlin Wall. Katy dove into each section, flipping ahead or checking the index whenever something caught her curiosity.
Near the end of our marathon, she asked, “Is Harriet Tubman in there?” and rushed to the index. She spent several pages reading about the Civil War and stopped only to ask what “Confederate” meant. I didn’t have an immediate answer, so I looked it up. She laughed and observed that whenever she asks something I don’t know, I go find the answer right then. “That’s the best time to learn,” I told her. We discovered that the word “confederate” relates to a union, and that the seceding states called themselves the Confederate States of America—a historical detail that sparked both interest and a touch of humor.
When she finished, she asked where we would keep the encyclopedia. I showed her a special place on the bookshelf and she placed the book there with care. Then, eyes bright, she asked about an animal encyclopedia by the same publisher. I tapped my phone and told her it would arrive Thursday. Her excitement was unmistakable.
Watching her light up over colorful pages and curious facts reminded me of why I love books so much. She discovered, in a single afternoon, the thrill of following her questions to new answers—and that is a treasure worth more than any other.
To learn more about the history curriculum we use, consult the publisher’s resources for The Story of Our World.