By the light of the lamp next to the bed, Susan, my eight-year-old, reads a passage of the book to her younger brothers, one at her left shoulder, the other on her right. The toddler is sleeping in her crib across the room, already lulled to sleep by the sound of Susan’s voice.

Normally I would chase the boys back to their room, but tonight I let them be awhile longer. Susan is reading from her Bible, I recognize a part of a psalm, and Peter and Edmund are hanging on every word.

Susan is a fine reader. I’m not sure how much she understands of the New International Version, but she’s reading it. When Susan does read, often it’s a fact book about animals, the trivia off the back of the cereal box or a kid’s magazine like Spider or Kids National Geographic. She’s crazy for the I Spy series. Occasionally it’s a Magic School Bus picture book.

Now I wait for her to discover all the books I loved as a girl, some of them already on our bookshelf. The Cricket in Times Square. The Black Stallion. I know she can easily read the text, but has yet to select a book, read the back cover and be intrigued enough to start with Chapter One.

Waiting is not easy. Do I require her to read an hour no matter what? Let her set the pace, and fret that she is not reading enough, like I’m doing now? These are the questions I ask myself. She doesn’t lack the opportunity for reading with an abundance of TV or computer games to distract her. Most of the time she is playing with her siblings, and they aren’t readers yet, so reading for her is solitary.

My mother instinct says to back off and keep waiting. Susan is only eight. A young reader won’t transform into a Newbery-book lover overnight. You can’t force a child to love a beautiful storybook before she is ready, and I suspect you can drive the love of the written word from a child by making reading a chore.

Yet still the homeschool mom in me says to park her fanny in the chair so she can read an hour from Romana the Brave or Pippi Longstocking or Frecklejuice or some title similar. Something by Ronald Dahl. I loved Harriet the Spy. Susan loves to play spying games, yet she has yet to pick up the book and read. Can’t reading be a discipline that is practiced everyday for a set time period? Is it too much to ask?

That is the quandary. Push or wait and let her decide?

I’ll wait.