Books transport us to new and magical places

Our boys love, love, love playing video games. But if there's anything that even comes close, it's reading books.And they like to read books on paper. Hold them in their hands and turn the physical pages. Fiddle with bookmarks absentmindedly as they finish chapter after chapter.At one time, our younger boy found reading to be a chore. He like the stories, but the act of reading itself was bothersome. Our older boy always loved reading, and we also always read bedtime stories.Some were silly little stories that made us all laugh, like If You Give a Mouse a Cookie. Others were classic children's tales, such as Rudyard Kipling's Just-So Stories (though we were judicious on which stories we actually read). We read the original Pinocchio and were shocked at how much violence there was in the original, non sanitized-for-Disney tale.Later, we graduated to other kinds of reading. We have the Marvel Encyclopedia and would give each boy two or three selections we'd read to them each night, depending on the length of the entry. They would each choose two or three superheroes or villains they wanted to learn more about. Some entries were two or three pages (say, Spider-Man or Hulk), others were much shorter (Star Lord, for example, wasn't so big before Hollywood got a hold of him).I learned a lot about more obscure superheroes, too. After learning that Vision and the Scarlet Witch at one point were married in lived in the New Jersey suburbs, we made up lots of stories of Scarlet Witch getting upset over not getting triple coupons at the supermarket and Vision being tired of being the only dude who showed up to the PTO meetings.Trust me, they were pure comedy.The boys eagerly awaited bedtime each night.As they got older, we graduated to the Nixon Tapes transcripts, with my husband imitating Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, along with an ever-changing cast of characters. The boys would be in hysterics, but they also now know about a serious piece of U.S. history.My husband goes to the library several times a week now to find new and interesting books that the boys would like. New series in fantasy, fiction, and science fiction come home and both boys plow through books faster than we do. They know that even if they get their videogame privileges taken away, we'll never prevent them from reading books.Maybe that's why they're so interested in reading. Whatever the case, it works and we have two avid readers in our house.Photo via StockUnlimited