I never paid attention to my seven-year-old son’s hobbies, until his school held a reading marathon and I recorded his daily page count. My first grade son read 164 chapter book pages per day. He attended school, participated in sports four days a week and played hard on the weekends; yet, dedicated free time to reading.

Where did it all begin?

Perhaps two weeks after he was born. Feeling stir-crazy, I played folk songs while wiggling his arms and legs as if he were a puppet in The Sound of Music. Three times a day, I read seven picture books – twenty-one picture books per day. That made for hundreds of fantastical stories with dazzling artwork and catchy phrases. I covered numerous Bible picture books. We visited the library two or three times a week and hung out at the Thomas the Tank Engine section of our local book store once a week. I questioned whether such a young child gained anything  but appreciated interacting with him and staying busy.

By the time he was two, he became interested in non fiction books. Not only obsessed with weather, horses, and reptiles, he taught himself the spellings and facts about dinosaurs. I only wished I could go back to high school and retake a few tests.

By the time he was four, I read Bruce Coville books out loud. Imaginative, ironic and inviting, Coville novels sparked in my son a yearning to know the “what ifs” of the world. My son proved he was listening all those years by finding similarities in the plots. He gathered his Coville books together and counted the pages.

“Hey, in all his books, his first chapter is X number of pages long. They enter the fantasy world around Y number of pages. The bad guy shows up around Z page. Do you think the author did that on purpose?” He flipped through several books to show me the similarities.

“Really? The author follows a rhythm for his outlines? That’s impressive that you noticed.” I wondered why I never thought to count the pages.

He’d ask me to reread certain scenes from the Coville novels, digesting whether a boy would actually twist a ring and say the magic words if he knew he’d turn into a monster. Was it bad to be a monster? He was never quite sure whether a girl should trust a unicorn. He wanted to fully understand the cave scene.

When he was five, I was in charge of reading R.L. Stine books to him, but I wasn’t dedicated enough. He wanted to know what happened too soon for me to keep up and so he started reading by himself in the bathtub. No boy could resist opening the cover when rewarded with a moaning ghost.

Along came the Black Stallion. A boy, an adventure, and my son read it independently and noticed typos. By then, he wanted to be a hero.

Vacationing in Virgin Gorda, his reading appetite peaked when I bought aTreasure Island book with a CD narrative. Ignoring the beach toys, he followed along, learning how to spell. When we snorkeled in the caves that inspired the story and he was mesmerized.

When he was a six-year-old first grader, he graduated to the C.S. Lewis,Chronicles of Narnia so he could beat his older sister who read them when she was in second grade. Sometimes, he accidentally dropped his books into the bathtub. While one book dried on the towel rack, he’d switch to another, adopting the habit of reading three books at once.

“Don’t forget number 154.” He called out numbers whenever he had to stop reading and go to school. His system was for me to remember where he needed to pick up later.

He stuck with non fiction adult books. At a silent auction, he insisted we bid on a series about ghost sightings throughout the state. We spent weekends at the ghostly destinations because he was curious what they were like.

After years of his persistent questions regarding the differences between the movie and novel versions of The Lightning Thief, at age seven, still in first grade, he demanded I purchase all of the books at once, swearing he would read them. I doubted he would but bought them anyway. His comprehension and speed developed with the Riordan series. Finishing each book in three to five days, he was able to discuss mythology and teach me a few facts. He crossed over to being an official story junkie.

Is that all it takes, starting to read great books at an early age?

Perhaps, his interest developed prior to his birth? During my pregnancy, I dutifully listened to classical music and limited my diet to fruits, vegetables, dairy, and during the third term, fish. I meditated, walked three miles every day and did floor exercises until my seventh month. After he was born, I took him for daily walks, stopping to show him the cackling egrets during mating season, and collecting leaves and rocks along our path.

Once he was old enough to sit up in his stroller, we took the Audubon field guide everywhere we went, looking up which birds lived at the lake and which preferred the trees. Each day, we ate popsicles in a flowering thicket, waiting forpileated woodpeckers and jeweled hummingbirds and barred owls to join us so we could reread their narratives.

Maybe it was generational, going back to how much my family loved books. His father’s a genius reader – an exceptionally smart man. He retained the knowledge he gained at those swanky schools he attended.

I studied my older siblings’ schoolbooks to compare the prior scientific conclusions with the then-current findings. My sister’s social studies book devoted a chapter on why man would never reach the moon. An encyclopedia set dated around 1903 intrigued me by listing great men who had been forgotten. I read aloud to my Siamese cat each night. Her favorite story was about a lost dog looking for his mother. Before that, my mother took me to the library once a week where I discovered Little Babaji.

Outstanding authors motivated my son to read. The ability of Coville, Stine, Lewis and Riordan to arrange words to share their imaginations enticed him to read. Their ingenious skill with incorporating history with fantasy prompted my son to evaluate the characters’ behaviors.

By studying their work, my son developed an awareness. He noticed someone mentioned in chapter three was never brought up again. He asked me whether it was a mistake or perhaps Suzanne Collins intended for the boy to stay behind in the underworld.

“You’ll have to read the book in order to find out. If you want an answer, you have to look it up.” It was the same answer I gave when he asked about gaps in movie plots and like always, he took my advice.

Which came first, the chicken or the egg? The geniuses wrote the books, which taught children how to think like geniuses.