There you go then, here’s example 195,734,789,349,249 of a child falling in love with books – by way of their parents.

It’s simple, really.

If you want to raise literary kids…

Do literary things.

My mother, afraid the impoverished school system would hobble her children, acquired, from somewhere, a “college prep reading list.” Trained in India to be a physiologist, married at twenty-three, and preoccupied with raising three kids in a country that was not her own, she had not read many of the books on the list herself. But she would make sure her kids were not deprived. She made me read 1984 when I was ten years old; I was scandalized by the sex, but it also instilled in me a deep love of, and care for, language.

-Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air (Amazon)

The kind of books that sell, and manage to still sell, are books that communicate timeless truths in a universal way.

No author wants a flash in the pan kind of book.

They want a book that gets better with time – a Perennial Seller.

This is the desire for blog posts too, actually.

Bad books sell; people have bad taste. Bad books don’t sell; people prefer great books. Great books sell; after all, they are great. Great books don’t sell; they are too great to be understood. Great books sell only after their authors die. We’re comfortable with all of these clichés even though they can’t logically coexist.

-Sarah Manguso, 300 Arguments (Amazon)