The first book I ever read was opened sitting on my dad’s lap in the Eastern Cape of South Africa. In my mind’s eye it is a Sunday and the afternoon light has created a glow around just us.
I am five, and the book is Enid Blyton’s Five on a Treasure Island, passed down to me from when my dad was a child. In it, we were two tagalongs to the adventures of the Famous Five, as they searched for gold on the coast of Cornwall.
One day, about halfway through this first gripping read, I asked my dad if we could read the next chapter in our adventure. I must have caught him at a bad time, because he told me: “You can read now, you can read it yourself.”
And read I did.
Finishing that book was a moment of pride for me. It set me free in a way a child had not experienced before. My whole world opened up.
? World Book Day – Did you know?
- World Book Day is marked globally on April 23, the shared death date of literary legends William Shakespeare and Miguel de Cervantes (1616).
- UNESCO launched it in 1995 to promote reading, publishing, and copyright.
- In South Africa, a staggering 81% of Grade 4 learners cannot read for meaning in any language – PIRLS 2021
- But there’s hope: According to the 2023 National Reading Barometer, 52% of adults who live with children read with them, which is a significant increase from 35% in 2016.
I come from a reading family. My mother is an avid fan of crime and thriller novels, while my father is partial to non-fiction tales of philosophers and theologians, world wars and world travels. I was still devouring the Famous Five instalments when my sister, two years my junior, burst into tears, crying: “Everyone reads here! I want to read too!”
I see my dad’s influence in everything around me. I have an ongoing love for motorsport because my dad passed on his copies of Long Way Round and Long Way Down to me. At the back of my mind I have a vague and fuzzy knowledge of the life of German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, after Dad bet me £50 I couldn’t finish his 600-page biography in a month. I was 13, and I can’t remember what I did with the £50.
My dad starts every morning with his Bible and accompanying texts, with pens, rulers and a notebook to jot down his thoughts as he reads. Wherever he goes, those books go too. Every family holiday, and more recently, the trip he made to visit me for a month, those books came with. His life is in those underlinings, his faith symbolised in those pages.
He has given me a love for bookshops, which means we also share a mild penchant for hoarding. My greatest treat would be when he took me to visit the second-hand Oxford Bookshop on Chamberlain Road in East London. He knew the owners by name – he knows everyone’s names, always – and I would delight in scouring for my next read.
Read more: Lessons from father
His studies in my childhood homes were always lined with books, “for reference”, he still says. His books on the Greek language, Judaism, Christianity and theological texts all followed us when we left East London, packed into boxes and shipped to Bristol in the UK.
My books came too.
Everything I knew about the world was between the covers of books. I dreamed about faraway places and alternate realities. I was a fairy and a mermaid and a princess, I was an author and a chef and private investigator. I learnt about boys and sex and feminism and growing up.
I was a confused and angry teenager, stuck in that awful phase of not knowing yourself and feeling isolated from everyone around you. It was the beginning of Facebook and Instagram and the iPhone and no one knew how to navigate social media or set healthy boundaries for screen time. I would have my treasured iPod Touch confiscated as a punishment for some teen crime, and I would weep into my pillow as though I had lost a part of me. But when the tears dried, I always found my way back to my bookshelf.
As I became an adult, my relationship with my dad changed. I was no longer the curly-haired girl who could fit beside him on an armchair and trace Enid Blyton’s words with my fingertip. And now I know, as teenage narcissism has (hopefully) faded, that he is not the same person either. But he is still my dad, he still gets up every morning and opens his Bible, and he still browses and collects books.
In 2021, my dad went for a check-up with his GP, and was then referred to a cardiologist, who promptly booked him into hospital. He underwent a five-way bypass later that week. After his surgery, I visited him in the ICU, sanitised and masked, and saw my strong dad rendered weak and pale as hospital sheets. Stuck in a room and confined to a bed, a shadow of who he was, he still wanted to read. I sent in magazines, hopeful that the shorter articles, larger text and pictures would be less daunting than the long chapters of his books. In those initial days, modern medicine and pain relief meant he was never awake for very long, but I think there was a comfort in knowing his books were close by. A week later, during one of my visits, I saw his copy of Born to Run on his bedside table. It would be weeks before he could walk by himself, and months before he returned to running. I found the paperback depressing in that hospital room, but I think that book kept his hope alive.
As I think back on my memories with my dad throughout my life, many of these reflections are set in bookshops. From our neighbourhood store with the orange salt lamps and burning incense, to the book exchange where he made friends with the owner and accumulated store credit (which he kindly gifted to me and I wasted no time spending). He loves the Jacob Gitlin Library in Cape Town and forwards me their newsletters about book launches and new releases. This winter, we spent an hour in an old house in Barrydale that has been converted into a bookstore. We were never in the same room – I was in the kitchen with the fiction, and he was browsing philosophy in the living room – but we would pass each other in the hallway to share our finds. On the drive back to Cape Town we stopped at Liberty Books, where he imposed a time limit for browsing. At 26, I was as impressed by that as when I was six years old.
Read more: What’s the point of books now?
He now lives in Vietnam, and our relationship has again shifted and evolved. In his most recent WhatsApp message to me, he is sitting in a bookshop I discovered in Hanoi during my last visit, surrounded by bright-yellow walls on a busy street in the city. He is sending pictures of A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara to me. I tell him it is on my list for December. “Good,” he says.
I now have my own bookshelves in my own home, and they are, of course, full to overflowing.
I have released most of my childhood books, sadly, and with the ache of childhood nostalgia, but one book has followed me from that sunny lounge two decades ago, to the UK and back, to the home of my teenage years and now to my own flat.
I try to clear out regularly, resisting the inherited urge to keep every copy close. I resolve that, just as pianos are meant to be played, books are meant to be read, and I pass them on when I finish the last page. Still, there is much to still be read, and most of the shelves are full of books I still have yet to open.
Except one.
Its cover is faded, and my child self-scrawled her name on the yellowed pages inside. I keep Five on a Treasure Island as a reminder of what a gift it is to read, the privilege of education and the worlds that one book opened up to me. But I also keep it for the little girl on her dad’s lap.
My dad reads, and so do I. DM