Read together

When my children ask me to read together, a different light suddenly comes on, overlapping the light coming from the windows or lamps. It happens on weekends, on the couch, and on mellow vacation days, on the hotel terrace or in the bed of a rented apartment. These are moments of stratospheric value, whose price is gold in the present, but plummets in the futures market. Adolescence will soon arrive, and instead of reading on the couch or in bed, they'll prefer a room with a closed door, headphones, and a do-not-disturb sign. That's why I sometimes look up from my book and watch them engrossed in their picture books, their mangas, their first novels, those fictions that move, amuse, and challenge them, to remember that blink, that half-smile, that illuminated concentration.

We'll delay cell phones as much as possible. We'll extend the time for books, board games, balls and bicycles, video games, and Studio Ghibli movies. Time without divided attention. There's no rush. The poisoned gift, the rite of passage, the overwhelming complexity, will come to them. And it will be good that it comes, because learning to be an adult in the 21st century means learning to master, as much as possible, cell phones, email, search engines, social media, and artificial intelligence so that you're not the one dominated. Finding that new balance, among all the same old ones.

Learning to be an adult means learning to master your mobile phone, email, search engines, and social networks.

I sense that, despite statistics showing that very young people are reading more than ever, social perception stubbornly repeats that they only consume screens because their reading has become invisible to the eyes of adults. It has disappeared from public transport and beaches, from the space where other generations could see that young people were taking over, that they were readers. Now the bus, the subway, and swimming pools are the realms of the mobile phone. The mass reading of young people has become almost exclusive to bedrooms. We can guess it thanks to the figures on books sold in bookstores or lent, in libraries, or among friends (teenagers are dealers by nature). But it is almost invisible. It only appears through webcams, on YouTube or TikTok, those other windows.

Read also

I take advantage of the fact that they're still closed to watch them read Detective Conan , Adèle , Geronimo Stilton , the universes that occupy in their imagination the same areas that The Hollisters or Tintin occupied in mine when I was their age and there were only three channels on the television and a couple of hours of children's programming a day. On TV, Diana would peel off her skin and you could see her lizard-like face; or David would talk to Knight Rider. I read alone during the golden weekend afternoons. In the background, mákina music would begin to play, but the Spectrum 128K with cassette hadn't arrived in our lives and the future wasn't yet a market.