How I'm brought to book each night

It's a Dad's Life;Everybody says it: reading to your children is one of life's delights. Yeah, yeah, yeah, what it really is is a noose around your neck for at least an hour every night, writes Adam Brophy

My incarceration started when the elder was about six months old and developed an infatuation with The Hungry Caterpillar. As soon as she was capable of sitting upright, she started to hammer her copy and grunt at me. "Uh, uh, uh, uuuhhhhhh," bang, bang, bang. The only way to appease her was to settle down and start reading, and it wasn't as if she was entranced by the colours of the drawings or the cadence of the language, she was in thrall to the process of my reading to her. One of the first strings to my bow of slavery.

Before we could get to the last page, she would start in again, "uh, uh", and turning the book back to the beginning. Once we got started, the only thing that could prise her away would be the promise of food or fatigue knocking her out. I'd read that damn thing 15 times over and she'd keep on wanting more. "By the light of the moon a little egg lay on a leaf . . . " I knew it backwards but wasn't allowed sit back and recite it - we had to hold the book properly, go through it page by page, and had to match the same routine every time.

I'm not going to get precious about books and reading. I read quite a bit, mainly fiction, and a little bit compulsively. The thought of a long period in a confined space without reading material frightens me, and, while I hope the kids will develop an interest too, if they don't the world won't stop spinning.

Because if there is one thing that turns me off the whole process, it's the smug, assumed superiority of the reader. The presumption that the book is always better than the film, that to view is human but to read divine.

I have witnessed people hold books to their noses and writhe in near-sexual frenzy at "the new-book smell". These are usually the same people who won't buy vegetables that haven't been pre-rolled in muck at a farmers' market, yet here they are professing their ardour for paper dipped in chemicals that could rot your bones. The physical product generally pales in comparison to much of the technology we take for granted in our daily lives, but occasionally what is written inside can make a difference. But again, that experience is purely subjective - what moves you may or may not move me.

Nowhere is that more apparent than when reading to the kids. I only recently discovered Roddy Doyle's children's books. The Giggler Treatment had me chuckling and in doing so I learned that the elder has developed a new skill - appeasing me. She saw me enjoy a book physically; doing the voices, jigging around the place, getting involved in the story. So she did the same, assuring me that she loved it as much as I did. The thing is, she didn't.

She liked it, but it may have been a little bit of a stretch for her still. What she loved was the shared experience, in just the same way that at six months old she wanted to traipse through that caterpillar book over and over again, all the time following the same route. Because the book isn't the story, it is the means to the story and if that story is shared in print, on the screen, on the stage or on the back of a cornflakes box it doesn't matter. As long as it is passed from one to another, and each can share in the thrill of it.