What are you and your kids really enjoying right now?

Our reading life is always evolving, but I find that as my children get older — they are now 11 and 9, and to put this in perspective, when I started writing this newsletter, they were 5 and 3 — it’s actually harder than it used to be.

For most of 2025, we struggled to figure out our bedtime reading routine. As I’ve admitted many times over the years, at bedtime I transmorgify into the most hideous and worst version of myself, tapped out to my toes, and none too patient about how close I am to getting into my own bed, so close I can taste it! Why won’t you just brush your teeth without sobbing over some completely inconsequential nonsense between you and your sister so we can READ HAPPILY AND PEACEFULLY LIKE HAPPY, PEACEFUL READERS, I BEG OF YOU!

Anyway, over time, at bedtime we changed from reading picture books and poetry and chapter books all muddled up together to mostly poetry and chapter books, to chapter books alone, until one night they said they just wanted to read their own books. They still wanted me there, laying with them, reading my own book, but they didn’t want me to read aloud.

I was okay with this. I was still (and am still) reading aloud to them at breakfast —poetry and picture books we have continued at their request — so I didn’t feel completely bereft, or even incompletely bereft. Surprisingly, I found that it’s more important to me that my children have agency over their reading lives than it is that we have the family reading life I imagine for us, whatever that looks like at any given time.

And then, maybe six months later, one night after they’d already cried over the inconsequential bathroom nonsense, they started crying about how we never read picture books at bedtime anymore. I said I missed that too, but was following their lead — and would follow their lead, if they wanted to change things, and change things again, and change things again.

That’s how you continue to build a family reading life that works for everyone. It’s not the entirety of how, of course — and everyone’s how looks different, which is the way it should be — but it’s a major part of how. Kids evolve — and grownups, whose needs also matter, evolve — and what everyone wants and needs from books evolves, so why wouldn’t the life you’re building around that evolve too?

Here is your permission to change things, and change things again, and change things again.

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Here’s what my kiddos and I have been into lately:

(If I’ve reviewed any of these in the past, I’ve linked to those here)

• Crenshaw by Katherine Applegate

• The Future Book by Mac Barnett

• Katje the Windmill Cat by Gretchen Woelfle

• My Sister, Goose by Alyssa Satin Capucilli

• Of Numbers and Stars: The Story of Hypatia by D. Anne Love

• Julius, the Baby of the World by Kevin Henkes

• Elizabeth, Queen of the Seas by Lynne Cox

• Belly Up by Stuart Gibbs (audio)

• Joan in the Cone by Billy Sharff

• Ada Byron Lovelace & the Thinking Machine by Laurie Wallmark

• Bobcat Prowling by Maria Gianferrari

• Except Antarctica by Todd Sturgell

• Always Room for One More by Sorche Nic Leodhas — We reread this old favorite of ours because I dug it out as part of my contribution to author and fellow Substacker Travis Jonker’s fun recent post:

  Caldecott Medal: The Definitive Superlatives

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As for my own reading:

It seems I am still recovering from the concussion I suffered at the end of January — I have never struggled so hard to read in my life, nor have I read so little in many, many years. In addition to the fact that there is literally nothing I can do about this except give it time — ugh, the WORST — I have given myself permission to do nothing about it, which is a little mind trick I sometimes play when I have no control over something but want the comfort of believing I do.

Here are a few titles I’ve read lately that I’ve loved:

• Tell Me by Kim Addonizio

• Eleanore of Avignon by Elizabeth DeLozier (audio)

• Hot Wax by M.L. Rio

• The Love Letter by Cathleen Schine

• One Aladdin Two Lamps by Jeanette Winterson

Our reading builds our private library, and the connections, the patterns, are like tree roots spreading unseen, underground.

Yes, here are the trees, separate, seemingly unrelated, yet underneath is a vast rootal network.

The more you read the more connected your network. Not the superficial connections of the social network, rather the particular and personal connections you have made that form a vast raft beneath you.

In your mind you can cross-reference. In your mind you can see the pattern clearly. How something from Shakespeare fits with a story by A. M. Homes or George Saunders. Or a song by Joni Mitchell, or a painting where a line from a poem joins it to some place deep in you. This pattern you are making is unique. It is riches. It is yours.

(One Aladdin Two Lamps, page 92-93)

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Your turn! What are you reading with the children in your life?

(Board books, picture books, graphic novels, middle-grade titles, nonfiction, audiobooks, seek-and-finds — we’ve got all ages and no judgment here.)