Today’s reading is a love letter to reading itself. In A Child of Books, a girl who comes from a world of stories floats across a sea of words, finds a boy who has never known that world, and invites him in. Oliver Jeffers draws the children with his light, wandering pen line, and Sam Winston, a typographic artist, builds the world around them from the actual words of classic books. The children climb mountains made from Peter Pan and play hide-and-seek in a forest whose branches are made from fairy tales. As the journey goes on, the black-and-white drawings gradually fill with color, until the final spreads are rich and full, as if reading itself were bringing the boy to life.

I shaped this episode around an “Invitation” arc: the girl who already loves stories, the boy who does not yet know them, and the moment one reader opens the door for another. That is, after all, what a read-aloud is.

Before recording, I chose the hide-and-seek page for my index card. In the book, the boy peeks around a tree trunk made from the edge of an old book, with fairy-tale sentences spreading overhead like branches. My version has the boy cut from wood-grain paper, as though he is half made of the forest himself, with brown hair, blue shorts, and red shoes, standing beside a dark wooden trunk. He sits inside a red border with black dots, in my handmade red-and-black frame.

Watch the full episode, and then pick up a book and invite someone in.