James & the Giant Peach, Reading the Dictionary, and the Little Free Library

My childhood bedroom (where I am writing this now) has been through many iterations. By far my favorite, or at least the most nostalgic, is when it was an aggressive shade of 2000s-era turquoise. In the corner was a toile de Jouy rocking chair, slightly mismatched from the rest of the vaguely oceanic room, and yet it was often the focus. That chair is where my dad sat and read to me and my sister almost every night of our childhood. Our range in books was certainly eclectic; The Phantom Tollbooth, and Ms. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH being some of my favorites and longest lasting in my memory. But there was also Merriam-Webster's children’s dictionary, or an interesting Wikipedia article sometimes thrown in there for our betterment. Many of the chapters and storylines have since slipped away, except for one that remains a little more concrete for one main reason.

While moving into my current college house this past summer, my mom put me up to the task of going through my bedside table drawers and picking what I wanted to accompany me back up the road and into my new room. While I normally obsess over an organizational task, this one was harder for me to find the will to commence. All of my items and trinkets had happily cemented themselves in those drawers. A disarrayed museum of all the things I used to reach for and find special enough to stow away. One of those was my 7th-generation iPod nano in a sort of seafoam green. Unable to hold a charge for more than about 10-15 minutes at a time, and much smaller in my hand than it used to be, it was the most sentimental item from those drawers. So naturally it was packed and sent driving back to Eugene with me. In the early stages, my room was incredibly bare. No art on the walls or curtain on my window, and bags strewn all around a floor that begged for a well-deserved good sweep and mop. Sleeping in a mostly vacant room in the heat and musty smoke of a late Eugene summer called for some sort of entertainment, and having exhausted my scrolling already, I turned to my iPod. Lucky enough to find my Bluetooth earbuds connected, I started to scroll through the library. Very obviously marked by my parents' music taste (for which I am grateful), I ran through my favorite songs while imagining shapes in the fake plaster texture of my ceiling. After running through all the songs, I perused the other apps. Inventory included only 1 episode of the PBS show The Electric Company, the radio stations I tuned into when I was in seventh grade, and several voice memos. The voice memos were of greater interest because A) I never remember recording them, and B) 4 of the 5 were only 4 seconds or less, and the 5th was 9 minutes. Going through the first 4, I immediately had my heart wrenched out of me. My earbuds played back to me the sound of a 10-year-old me making an audio time capsule for myself. The younger Addie introduced herself, screaming her name (still feels fitting), and then ran through several words in her much higher-pitched 10-year-old voice, then asking the question, “What do I sound like now saying those same words?” 

Already torn apart, I was nowhere near ready for the 9-minute voice memo, which I expected to be more of the same, or an accidental recording of silence. Instead, I was greeted with the sound of my dad reading James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl, from that rocking chair. I could picture it very easily now. My sister likely already passed out next to me (she doesn’t remember most of the books we read because she was in favor of an early bedtime), the lamp to the side of the chair, which would inevitably be tipped over if the rocking chair swung too far. I could even situate myself in the events of the book, which I thought were archived and dusty in the recesses of my brain. Not only was I rocked emotionally, but I was overwhelmed by how grateful I was to have parents who taught me to love reading and read to me every night.

And reading and literacy are more important than ever. A recent article by Dana Goldstein of the New York Times states that “The percentage of fourth graders at “below basic” [reading skills] was the largest in 20 years, at 40 percent”, meaning that these students “cannot sequence events from a story or describe the effects of a character’s actions”. While this decline is understandably multifactorial, Nat Malkus of the American Enterprise Institute points out that children and adults are watching more videos on their screens, displacing the opportunity to read text. I would be beyond hypocritical to bash screen time. Even now, I have a TikTok recipe video playing on loop in the background. But it is also beyond evident to me that the peace my brain feels when looking at a page--even when the text is tiny, the pages are tattered, and the plot is distressing--is greater than the quietness the scroll system of my phone can provide. Early parent-child book reading has been shown to improve a child's reading comprehension, receptive vocabulary, and internal motivation to read regardless of socioeconomic status. Reading to children is also beneficial to the parent, with research showing that it diversifies vocabulary and encourages syntactic complexity (more intricate sentence structures). Children whose parents read to them daily are exposed to at least 290,000 more words when entering kindergarten than their counterparts who were not read to. 

Statistics aside, reading aloud has been transformational for me as well. In elementary school, I was always giddy to be called on during popcorn reading so I could show off how quickly I could read a passage, and for a while, I would time myself speeding through the Pledge of Allegiance as the rest of my class methodically read it off the poster on the wall (my teachers were not so pleased with this behavior). I prided myself on my pace, but much of the meaning was lost along the way. In fifth grade, my friend Meg and I were recruited to read with first graders. I wore this like a badge of honor. Me, a chosen reader. A mental gold star of approval. But the task at hand was much more challenging than I was expecting. Sitting down that first day, at a stooped table in the library, damaged mini chairs in a gaunt shade of tan flanking it, I realized quickly that I had come in with inaccurate expectations of this experience. This wasn’t popcorn reading, this was a practice in patience and in many ways teaching. I don’t remember the name of the little girl I read to, but she kept me in check, whether knowingly or not. She would ask me to slow down, to let her try reading, to explain words, and even sometimes to just be silent and look at the drawings. In my pursuit of page-turning efficiency, I had lost the impact of the author's words, even if the story was as simple as a ‘cat-sat-on-Pats-lap’ BOB book. And recently, I was given, or rather, I stumbled across a book that reminded me of this lesson. 

For weeks, these little dainty pen and ink illustrations had been sprinkled across my Pinterest feed, and I continued to save them, curious as to where they came from. About a week after the first image caught my gaze, I decided to go on a mid-afternoon walk. This is nothing out of the ordinary; in fact, it’s probably where I am on most sunny days when I am not confined to a lecture hall. I looped through the neighborhoods behind campus, taking inventory of the cats sitting in the many-paned window sills, and then climbed up into Hendrick’s Park. Leaving, I decided to take a new route back, taking me down the road system near Pre’s Rock. I had been aware of a little free library/farmstand on that road since my freshman year. I once picked up an obscenely large zucchini there, along with a National Geographic about the rebuilding of Notre Dame. As I walked through the painted doors and quaintly shingled mini roof, I noticed a cabinet on the side that I hadn’t seen before. Combing through the contents, I saw several little golden books, and a seed packet or two, but then I stumbled across a 4x4 inch turquoise book (not unlike the color of my childhood bedroom), shabby at the edges, with an alligator in a bonnet having tea on the cover. It was called “I Like You” (written by Sandol Stoddard Warburg & illustrated by Jacqueline Chwast), and it was the very book that all the little illustrations I had been saving were from.


From the book “I Like You”

The sentences were short and broken up around the image in the center, forcing me to pause and look. It brought me back to the table in the library, where I was taught to slow down. But more than anything, it reminded me of that rocking chair in my room, the off-kilter lamp next to it, my sleeping sister at my side, and my dad, book in hand, reading me the stories that made me the reader, writer, and person I am today.

A collection of some of my little free library finds

Some of my favorite little free library locations:

** If you want to access a full list of locations, type in “Little Free Library” in Google Maps

  • Little Free Library #32187 (Northeast corner of University City Park, 2300 University St, Eugene, OR 97403)

  • Little Free Library Charter #109163 (2140 Olive St, Eugene, OR 97405)

  • Little Free Library #43439 (2028 Jackson St, Eugene, OR 97405)

  • And my personal favorite (the library in this blog above), 2585 Birch Lane, Eugene, OR, 97403


Sources: 

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6927670/

https://childmind.org/article/why-is-it-important-to-read-to-your-child/

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/29/us/reading-skills-naep.html

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