By Kitty Felde
It’s the hardest question in the world: what’s your favorite book and why?
I ask it at book festivals, classroom visits, and tapings of the Book Club for Kids podcast. I’m often surprised when kids and adults name a picture book – and then recite from memory a particular line or describe a specific illustration.
There’s nothing wrong with reading books below our reading level or books that we’ve already read. Someone called them our “literary friends” – books that remind us of happier times.
Picture books are often our first introduction to literature and feeling the power to decipher words. They inhabit a special place in our hearts.
If you have a young reader who’s fallen out of love with reading, ask them about their favorite book. Then find it at the library or local bookstore. Read it together. Or perhaps, leave it around the house “accidentally” where the reluctant reader can rediscover it for themselves. Talk about it. What is it about the book that resonates with your young reader? Does it have the same effect on you? Share your own favorite book.
That reunion with a favorite book can remind us of the joy of reading and take us back to the days when reading wasn’t an assignment, a chore, a bore, but a door to that magical place where we first discovered the power of a story.
Kitty Felde’s “Estado de la Unión,” the Spanish language version of “State of the Union,” just won the International Latino Book Award. Her Fina Mendoza Mysteries are published by Chesapeake Press.