I just bought my 8 year old daughter 50 books for the summer holidays

[mamalife1990]

As its the summer holidays I decided that I would let my 8 year buy some books for over the summer. She absolutely loves to read and I realised that it might be nice for her to have some new books to read over the next 6 weeks.

So I ordered her some books. However most of the books I ordered were series. I got a few individual books. But most of the books were series. Meaning I didn't really calculate how many books I was actually buying. My plan was, wait until all the books arrive, put them all in one big box and give the box to my daughter.

The last box arrived today so I went into my room and got every book and series out of their boxes....and I realised...that's a lot of books. So I decided to count and there is 50 books. 50! When you're buying book series, it's easy to forget how many books you are actually buying.

I gave my daughter the box and she is extremely happy. So seeing her smile was worth the financial cost of all these books.

Let's just hope my husband doesn't want a divorce after seeing so many books. Was this financially responsible? Nope. Do I regret anything? Nope.

Now my 4 year old wants some new books too 😭 Thankfully the books he would read are a lot cheaper lol

Great for your daughter. I would have loved new books as a child.

I dont understand how you can buy books without knowing how many you are buying.

This is so lovely. I would have loved this as a kid. I spent most of my summers reading books. DS14 used to read a lot of Diary of a Wimpy Kid and the Storey Treehouse collection. He's just getting back onto reading but he now prefers comic books or political/old books like Animal Farm, 1984 etc.

We have a book exchange in what was the library before it eas unfunded. I say exchange you can take as many as you like, leave books if you want, make a small donation if you want but it's really relaxed run 3 times a week for 2 hours by volunteers, italso has jigsaws and kids game/ small toys. So no paying for postage, and lots of very current book that ppl have bought for holidays. Any that are not 90% tidy get collected by a charity. We are very lucky.

That would have absolutely made my entire childhood! Well done Mum.

great - though with respect, the only person who can assure me that your DD doesn't feel this way is probably herself in say 12 years time

Like I said, family dynamics are a weird thing, kids know what will please us, and they can't always identify their own feelings at that age.

People are not interested in reading this thread at all. Every other poster seems to suggest joining a library.

OP, I think what you’ve done is fantastic and I have to say your thread shows just how many children love reading despite negative news reports to the contrary. I love children’s books too and am passionate about introducing new ones to my class. The saddest thing for me though is the widening gulf between the have and have nots in education. I’m a teacher and see first hand the difference between children who read and those who don’t. There is a frightening statistic about the amount of children who own less than 10 books. I seem to recall it’s 1 in 7 who live in book free homes.

Has your daughter read Charlottes Web yet? I’ve also come across a brilliant author called Anthony McGowan. He writes so well. I second the person up thread who suggested Podkin- that’s a great series

Jumble sale book stalls were my absolute favourite thing when I was a kid in the 80s!

Some of my favourite books as a result were really random things that nobody else had heard of and which were already out of print by the time I read them.

I think you’re projecting an awful lot of your own family’s issues on to other people here.

I’m sure the OP knows her own kids. No need to overthink this on her behalf.

I was just like your daughter at her age, and my love of reading has never left me! I'm a lawyer now, so I spend my days reading.

My best friend and I got through all the books in our local library (age appropriate books, of course!), so our parents used to buy us new ones. We'd then swap them so they didn't have to buy quite so many 😂

Our school was very small, and there was no social media back then, but I imagine there are groups nowadays where you can share books with other families.

My bilingual child (English is the minority language) loved Magic Faraway Tree, Flat Stanley and Narnia at that age.

Now 9, he’s begging me to continue the Wizards of Once series with me.

We also use a lot of English audio books as he reads in the local language and isn’t yet a fluent reader in English.

They were brilliant! I especially remember joyously exclaiming at a huge pile of Enid Blyton mystery books at an 80s school fete and buying the lot. The TA was standing to one side of the stall and beaming. She’d been surprised what a bookworm I was when she’d spoken to me the previous week, and had donated all her girlhood Enid Blytons to
the stall in the hope I‘d find them and get as much joy out of them as she had done.

Thanks, Mrs Baker!

We didn't have much money growing up and I still remember my 8th birthday my mum had been scouring charity shops for months and I was presented with a stack of books and my dad had made me a set of book shelves for my room from off cuts at work, it was the best birthday ever. I still love to read.

How lovely.

My DC are bookworms too so I buy a lot of books for them. They go to the library occasionally too, but it isn’t very convenient for us to get to so I’m happy to buy them.

They love keeping and re-reading lots of them, but others I sell as bundles on gumtree, which I prefer to Vinted as I don’t need to post out.

Oh this is so brilliant!

At that age and maybe a bit older (?) I was into the Twins at St Clare’s, Malory Towers (by Enid Blyton) and all the various horsey books - Jinny at Finmory, Jill’s Gymkhana, the series about Jackie and her horse and but I can’t remember what it was called, the Flambards books, Ballet shoes, the ice skating one, days and days just reading one after another ❤️❤️❤️.

This reminds me of the time my mother bought every single one of the sweet valley high books (remember them?) at a car boot sale

She thought reading for the fun of it was a waste of time but I adored those books (I loved reading,still do when i get the time)

I would only get to read them in the school library so having a whole bookcase of them wad magical

Best Christmas ever-it took me ages to work through them all

What a fabulous gift! I do believe that children should own some books if their parents are able to buy them, it's wonderful to be able to have books that are just yours, and children who own their own books are six times more likely to read above the level expected for their age!
However, is there any reason that you didn't borrow some of them from the library? It's free and better for the environment.
It's the summer so The Summer Reading Challenge will be on and it's free to collect stickers and little prizes, there are probably free events for children on too, and sometimes libraries have children's authors visit the library.
Also your library would probably love some of the books that you've finished with!

Well, the principle is a fairly widely accepted one, but okaaay.

To be fair, my lovely mum took me to the library every week and I received pocket money to buy books too, lest I make it sound like I was neglected, which I really wasn’t!

So OP shouldn’t buy books or express any joy in any book as it might cause psychological damage to her daughter even though this child is overjoyed by her new books?

Anyway @mamalife1990 its just struck me that the Enid Blyton school books might have been my generations Harry Potter, that’s a weird realisation!

When she’s a bit older she might like Anthony Horowitz too, there is a series of six boy spy books he has. Can’t remember what they’re called though.

No, that's not what I said. I said it was lovely, that I didn't want to piss on her parade, but she could mitigate the possibility of the gift not landing exactly as she thinks it will by having a conversation with her DD.

JFC. <edited from JFK typo😂>

Well OP said the daughter loves the books, she’s excited, has been reading them etc.

A present not landing ‘correctly’ could be said for any present to be honest.

Im sorry your present of books to your daughter wasn’t well received, but OP hasn’t said anything like that.

You can NEVER have too many books 📚 😉 🥰

You have brought back a wonderful memory here! Mum used to buy us a sack load of books at the start of the summer holidays and give them to us, it was absolutely wonderful 😂they were never new though, just picked up from second hand shops. She also used to ration them out to us (me and my sister) otherwise we'd have read the whole sackload in the first week 😂. We were probably a similar age to your daughter when she started this and it became a thing for several years!

Your lucky daughter. As others have suggested Charity shops are great places for getting whole sets of kids books for bargain prices ( plus it’s a wonderful form of recycling once the books have been read)
When my granddaughters were younger and came to stay in school holidays I would take them to the Street Library stands here in our city and in the Botanic Gardens so they could choose from the many free books in the stand. Some of the books they got were virtually new.
Once they had read them they would be taken to the Street Library nearest to where they lived and so the cycle continued.

Getting kids interested in reading is one of the greatest gifts ever.

I used to read so many books when young I belonged to two libraries. It did me no harm, as a wise man said hundreds of years ago “knowledge is power.”’ I am old now but I have been pretty successful because I knew stuff others didn’t.