The same people who create the wonderful stories we read to our kids and ourselves are often parents themselves, avid readers who want to pass on that love of books to their own children.

In what I’m hoping will be just the first in a series of guest posts by authors about reading to kids, novelist and author of the WWII memoir The Occupied Garden Kristen den Hartog talks about the wonder and joy of reading with her young daughter:

From the earliest days, reading with my daughter has been one of the great joys of motherhood. As a writer, a kids’ book blogger, and a lover of stories, it’s been fascinating to watch that same love develop in her. I remember when she was just two or so, and had begun to recognize books by their spines at the library, where we often went together, and where the librarians quickly knew us by name. She’d point to the words and announce the title, and though she didn’t yet “read” in the usual sense, I saw how this was an early and profound stage: seeing each combination of letters as a picture she understood. Around this same time, she began to memorize the stories we read together, and she would stop us when we missed a word or got it wrong. If we skipped a passage, she always caught us. Sometimes she would “read” from memory to our old cat who dozed beside her, finishing out his last days as she was starting hers, and I’d think, looking at them, who doesn’t love to be read to?

Reading has been a constant for us: from the picture books of Arnold Lobel and William Steig, on through Pippi Longstocking, Peter Pan, and The Secret Garden. We spent last Christmas with Ebenezer Scrooge, and all spring and summer, we stayed by Harry Potter’s side until Voldemort had finally been finished off. Reading is our comfort zone – we snuggle together every night, and the book joins us again at the breakfast table. Books get us through flus and colds and bad moods and roadtrips and thunderstorms. Now that my daughter is eight, I sometimes wonder how much longer we’ve got – because reading alone is a different kind of pleasure, and crucial too. But then I think of our old cat, soaking up those stories as much as the sun that streamed through the window, and I know we have a long way to go.

Kristen den Hartog is the author, most recently, of And Me Among Them, an adult novel about a girl who grows to giant proportions. She blogs about reading with her daughter at Blog of Green Gables.