I Have Read This Book 412 Times

There is a book in my house that I have read four hundred and twelve times. I know its page turns by feel. I know that the third spread has a crease, and that the crease is my fault, and that if I turn the page from the left corner he will notice and start again from the beginning.

I know this book better than my wedding vows. I did not choose this. Nobody chooses this. You choose it once, at a library or a supermarket or because it was £3 and had a bear on the cover, and then you choose it four hundred and eleven more times.

The five stages

Enthusiasm. A lovely book. Genuinely charming. You do the voices. You add a little flourish on the page with the owl.

Performance. You are now doing a show. You have a rhythm. You have discovered that the bear's line reads better in a slight Scottish accent.

Autopilot. Your mouth is reading. Your brain has left the building and is thinking about a spreadsheet, a dentist appointment and whether you locked the back door.

Resentment. You begin to hate the bear. You notice the bear is smug. You notice the book has a plot hole. You begin to suspect the author has never met a child.

Surrender. You stop fighting it. You read the book. It takes four minutes and it is the most relaxed either of you will be all day.

I have begun editing it. In my version, the bear apologises and everyone sleeps through the night.

Why they do it

It is not a failure of imagination. It is the opposite. Small people live in a world where almost nothing is predictable — who picks them up, what is for dinner, whether the loud hand dryer in the toilets will happen. The same book, the same words, the same ending is a small, reliable country. They visit it to feel safe.

Which is lovely, and does not change the fact that I can recite it in my sleep, which I have.

The rotation

What helped, in ascending order of effectiveness:

• Three at a time. Only three bedtime books in circulation. The other forty live on a high shelf, out of sight. Novelty returns when the shelf rotates, roughly monthly.
• The library rule. One new book per trip, chosen by the child, with no editorialising from me.
• The flip. “You read it to me tonight.” They cannot read. They will narrate it from memory and it will be a completely different, much stranger book, and it is the best part of the week.
• The car version. An audio edition means the book exists outside bedtime, which takes some of the pressure off bedtime to be everything.
• The skip clause. I am allowed to skip one spread per reading. I have never been caught. I am at peace with this.

The part I did not expect

One day they will not ask for it. There will be no announcement. It will simply stop, the way the nap stopped and the pushchair stopped, and I will not know that the last time was the last time.

Four hundred and twelve is a lot. It is not, it turns out, infinite.

on the book

The Angel

“Reading together builds language, bonding and routine.”

The Devil

“It builds language. The language is now mine, and it is the bear's, and I can do the bear's voice without moving my mouth.”