Scroll to the bottom of this post, look at the list of books, then look around your house, figure out if you own most of them, and come back to the top.
Done? Good, so how many do you have?
If you own most of them, you’re at-least literate and probably semi-competent as a parent. You probably want your kid to grow up and excel in high-school and college. If they are anything like you they’ll be doing drugs and having sex long before they should – despite your best efforts to prevent it – but at least they’ll be smart enough to avoid incarceration, which is what you want anyway – the illusion that your child is perfect. Maybe after that they’ll get married, buy a house, have a kid or two, and get a 401k. When they finally stop loving you they’ll at least feel guilty about it and put you into a semi-acceptable nursing home. Something fun to look forward to.
On the other hand, if you don’t have any of these, I’m sorry to tell you this, but you are already screwed. You’ve instilled no values or desire to acquire knowledge in your child. He or she will spend the next couple decades feeding their brain a constant diet of incomprehensible text messages and video games until they are no longer capable of actually learning anything useful. If you have a daughter she’ll probably be pregnant by the time she is eighteen and you’ll be lucky, really – really lucky, if you never have to call your local strip-club to interrupt her shift to ask where she keeps the medicine for the four illegitimate children you are baby-sitting for the fifth night in a row. Well done.
If you have a boy, you have a better shot. Fancy book learning doesn’t help you win football games, or lead you to success as an enlisted man in the Army, so perhaps you’ll get lucky and have a kid who is a decent athlete or who watched Top-Gun a few too many times. More than likely though, your little Einstein will probably end up having multiple encounters with the police before he’s twelve. You’ll wonder about the people visiting your house at 3am - those would be the junkies to whom he provides crack. If you are fortunate, little Johnny will end up in jail or become some other ward of the state so that you aren’t forced to take care of him, but the odds aren’t in your favor. Chances are he’ll live with you, mooching until he is middle-aged, at which time he’ll start plotting to kill you and hide your corpse in the basement so that he can use your social-security checks to buy malt-liquor and herpes medication.
Sounds like a rather bleak outlook doesn’t it? Perhaps you still have a chance though, it may not be too late to start stocking your house with books in an effort to encourage your child to read. The thing is, you don’t even have to read to them, you don’t have to spend any time encouraging the kid at all, you only need to keep the books in your house (see Freakonomics
So take my advice, buy some of these and save yourself a lifetime of disappointment and debt obligations to bail-bondsmen.
Note: This is in no way a complete list, just the most obvious classics I could think of.
Note 2: I’m only including books that are already in Anna’s library, these are mostly books for children under 5.
(if you happen to be an enormously pretentious douche-bag like me you can also torture your child by reading them Winnie the Pooh in Latin. “Ecce Eduardus ursus scalis nunc tump-tump-tump occipite gradus pulsante post Christophorum Robinum descendens.” This kid is going to hate me someday)
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