Hello there, book worm.
You seem to have your nose in a book most of your free time. Sometimes you’re looking over my shoulder as I readm, and increasingly you’re reading books like “Wish” on your own. At nighttime, you outsource my parenting duties, ask your Alexa for an audiobook, and listen to the narrator until you doze off.
The other day, your Mom and I went on a date, and Grandma Vicki came over to watch you and Matteo for a couple of hours. You got into your evening routine and read in your room. When Grandma checked on your and asked you about reading chapter books, you told her, “I’ve been waiting to do this a long time!”
It’s true, you really practiced reading the last year and now get to enjoy the benefit of exploring new worlds and characters through the pages. Reading is an amazing gift of knowledge and brain exercise that you should keep up. I wish I could say I was a good reader, but I’m really not. I’ll finish 3-4 books a year at most. I have friends that read that many in a month.
Right now, I’m pacing through Rick Rubin’s book, “The Creative Act: A Way of Thinking.” It’s a fantastic, medidative book about creativity with short chapters of 6-12 pages and I just read one at a time before I call it a day. I enjoy reading it, I just don’t get locked in the way you do to keep going and going. I listen to a lot of podcasts so I get my intellectual diet that way, I suppose.
In addition to reading you continue to write a lot. That European vacation book still holds the record for your longest work. Before this school year started, you voluntarily wrote a short autobiography as a gift to your new teacher so she could get to know you. I believe you also had the opportunity to read it in front of the class. For someone who comes across as shy and quiet, you don’t seem to hesitate to communicate through your writing and presenting it.
Of course, I’m creating something for you here that I expected you to read many years down the road, and I overlooked that could be much sooner. It will be a shift writing to you in a way you could read in real-time. I look forward to hearing what you think, after you catch up on the months past.
Love,
Dad