There are some books I don’t care for because I’ve read them (see: anything ending in -alicious). There are some books I loved as a kid but find hard to read to my children as an adult (Richard Scarry, do you have to name every last thing on the page? Surely you can skip the creamer pitcher. Come on, man, skip the creamer pitcher.) And then there are the books that (just being honest here) I don’t like on principle. Case in point:

Until recently, I had never read any of the books in this series. Or, I should say series of series – there are dozens of books in a multitude of spin-off series. That was part of the reason I resented them – there are so many and they never stop. I viewed them as literary junk mail.

I know – I’m terrible. Prejudgment at its finest (/worst). However: let she or he who has never done something like this cast the first stone.

“I am a force of good fighting to get my kid to only read the highest-quality books!”, I thought. Then my daughter picked one out at the library one day. And I read it with her.

It went…just fine.

When you dismount the high horse, you can feel pretty foolish as you slowly climb down, wondering why the hell you were up on that ridiculous nag in the first place. The experience was a good reminder (which, as you can tell, I need occasionally) to ease up.

My child loves a book I don’t. Who cares?