So my girl Katie and I made a plan to get out of town for a getaway weekend. We were going to go to a cabin in the middle-of-nowhere (which as it happens, is only about 90 minutes outside of Washington DC, who knew?), and she was going to get to be little, and I would be big.
I decided to read her a story. I went looking for an old familiar favorite book I loved as a kid, that I could read her at bedtime. It's called The Girl with The Silver Eyes. It's about a girl (who is also named Kate) who has silver eyes and is telekinetic.
It's kind of a grammar-school x-men pre-story. The book came out in the 1980's, and isn't available as an e-book.
I ordered it right away, and it came a few days before our trip.
I loved reading it to Katie as she drifted off to sleep in bed next to me. It was a sweet, tender experience. I actually ended up staying up way later than Katie, because I got wrapped up in the book.
Reading it as an adult, and as an author, was so different from when I first read it as a kid. All the stuff I loved was still there. But I could see "how the sausage was made", and did find the book lacking in many places. There was some really ham-fisted foreshadowing, and some plot elements which didn't quite click. It's funny too - the book very much shows its age. There's no Internet, no cell phones, and a certain sort of social naivety to the book which make it very, very dated. But I could still see the essential magic that made me like the book in the first place. It makes me want to go back and read lots of stuff from when I was a kid.
I especially want to do this with Katie. I like reading to her.