Hamish turned five in late September, in the stone house on Henderson Row in Edinburgh that his grandparents bought in 1978. The reading log his mother began on his birthday is now a year long.
The log is a small grid-paper notebook, kept on the bookshelf in the hall. Each night a title is written down. Sometimes a sentence is added. Sometimes nothing.
In October, the books were picture books almost without exception. Where the Wild Things Are appeared seven times. Bear Hunt, by Anthony Browne, appeared four. Not Now, Bernard was returned to nightly for nine days in a row.
Hamish was sitting in his mother's lap. He was holding the book himself, and turning the pages, and pointing to small details, and asking what a word meant about once every two pages.
November brought the first attempt at something longer. My Father's Dragon, by Ruth Stiles Gannett, was begun on the third night of the month. It was finished on the seventeenth.
Hamish lasted about eight minutes per session at first. By the end of the book he was lasting fifteen. The illustrations every few pages helped. The chapters were short enough that they could end at one.
December returned almost entirely to picture books. The holiday rush in the house was loud and full, and Hamish wanted what he knew. The log shows The Jolly Christmas Postman eleven times in the month of December alone.
January was the first cold month, and the cold months are the months of reading. The log shows fifty-eight separate entries for January, on a base of thirty-one days. Some nights were two books.
The big change of January was Charlotte's Web. It was started on a Thursday after Hamish had a bad day at his nursery and would not eat his tea. It was finished four weeks later.
Hamish cried at the end. He cried at the end again the next time he asked his mother to read it, in March. He was not afraid of the crying. It is one of the gifts of a book that it gives a child permission to feel something safely.
February brought the second long book, The Mouse and the Motorcycle, by Beverly Cleary. This was Hamish's first time choosing a chapter book himself, from the small library on the second floor of the public library on George IV Bridge.
He chose it because the cover had a mouse on a motorcycle. Most book choices at five are still made that way. There is no shame in it.
March was a slow reading month. There was a chest infection. There was a stretch where Hamish could not stay awake past the end of a single picture book. The log shows Goodnight Moon five times in a single week.
Picture books in a sick month are not a regression. They are an anchor. The log is honest about this and does not apologise for it.
April brought a third chapter book, The Hundred Dresses, by Eleanor Estes. It is a small book, less than eighty pages, and it is about a girl who is bullied. Hamish was quiet at the end. He asked his mother if it had really happened.
She told him the author had said it almost had. He thought about that for a long time. He asked for the book again on a Tuesday two weeks later, and then a third time in early May.
May was the first month with more chapter book entries than picture book entries. The transition has not been clean. Picture books still appear two or three nights a week, and they are not lesser nights.
June brought The Wind in the Willows, in the Methuen edition with the E. H. Shepard illustrations. The book is too old for Hamish in places. The Edwardian sentences run long. The vocabulary is not for five.
His mother read it anyway, and skipped where she had to, and slowed where she had to. Hamish liked Mole. He liked Ratty. He has not yet asked about the chapter at the gates of the dawn.
July brought hot weather and outdoor reading, on a small blanket in the back garden. The log shows shorter sessions, more interruptions, and a return to picture books in the evening when the light was good and the bees were still working.
August was a holiday month, on the West Coast at Plockton. The log shows eight entries, all picture books, all old favourites. Holidays are not for new books. They are for the comfort of the known.
September brought the end of the year, and Hamish's sixth birthday, and the start of school proper. The log will continue. The pattern of it is now clear.
A year of reading aloud at five is not a march from short books to long books. It is a tide, going in and out, with picture books always somewhere in the room and chapter books gradually accumulating as a kind of furniture in the mind.
The reading log is a small thing. It will not survive the move into Hamish's adulthood. But for a year, in a stone house on Henderson Row, it was a record of how a small reader was made, one night at a time.
