I'm sitting on the couch next to my 5-year-old. A thick book is sprawled across our laps and the warm Austin sun streams through the window as I clench my fists with frustration. I watch as he plows laboriously through a six-word sentence.

"Read it again," I say calmly.

Inside, I'm screaming with impatience. We've been working on the word "the" for 10 minutes. Another 30 seconds and I'll be bouncing on the couch cushions.

But then he reads, "The-ant-is-in-the-sand." And pauses. And thinks. "The ant is in the sand. Theantisinthesand!" A revelation. A sentence. A whole thought put together! And he looks up and gives me a smile. "The ant is in the sand."

I can see it. He's teetering on a precipice, about to dive in to what will hopefully be a lifelong love affair with the written word.

That is the single thing that keeps me glued to my seat, biting my bottom lip. It's what compels me to drag out the dreaded reading book each day, even if it means there's a candy bar bribe dangling at the end of every reading lesson. I do it because I remember sitting in the backyard maple tree reading Little House on the Prairie while the long summer days stretched themselves around me like melted taffy.

Spiders who wove words into webs; plastic American Indians who came to life; giant peaches that sprang up in the garden patch overnight: The timeline of my life seems to be pasted together by the books I read, the multiple, multiple readings of Beverly Cleary and Louis Sachar and E.L. Konigsberg.

On car trips (and we made a million), I wasn't in the back seat wedged among five brothers and sisters. I was lost somewhere performing Egyptian burial rites, or trying to burn out my tree house in the Catskills. I crack open these well-worn stories and see myself reflected in these pages — 8 years old, then 10, then 13.

And yet, I can see why so many parents give up, or never try, or leave it to the schools to do the messy business. It's maddening, this reading thing. My college Russian classes were easier than this — at least everything was pronounced phonetically.

"Sound out the word 'said,' " I tell my son. "Good. But it's actually not pronounced that way. It's pronounced 'sed.' Yes, it's a silly word."

This is a phrase I use a lot. Half the English language is silly. If I didn't love it so much, didn't absolutely adore a poetic turn of phrase with words strung together so deliciously that I could almost eat them off the page, I would have fled to Lapland long ago.

Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons by Siegfried Engelmann, Phyllis Haddox and Elaine Bruner (1986, Fireside) has held my hand all the way through the teaching process. I actually read, word-for-word, from a script highlighted with hot pink lettering. How, oh how, did they manage a hundred years ago?

Beatrix Potter, that venerable children's author, learned to read by slogging through Ivanhoe and Rob Roy . Imagine cutting your teeth on the classics! In the first paragraph of Ivanhoe is a sentence that is 103 words long. It's like throwing your kid in Lady Bird Lake with the expectation that he'll come back doing the butterfly. It seems so brilliant, and yet so impossible.

Our next move up the literary ladder will include Hop on Pop , and though I would love to vault right into 12th-century Scotland, something tells me we'll have to slog through several years of Captain Underpants before we get there. And, at this level, where we're still stuck on the one-syllable words, it all seems so unattainable.

But I want there to be a day, five years from now, when my son comes into my room holding Holes or "Harry Potter" and we sit and talk about that great story, about that moment in time when he was transported to an underground cavern, a dried-up lake or another world completely and came away bewitched.

Because the real point, the whole point of reading, is not to take tests or show off or get a job that pays a million bucks. It's about ink on a page laid out so delicately that it comes to life inside your head. It's one of the few magical things that still exist in the world. And it's worth every word.

This article originally appeared in the Austin American-Statesman , and is used here by permission.