When To Tell Your Parents About Oedipus

Tim Sterne on reading to your baby:

She's well, but not taking any interest in literature as yet. I was reading her an Isaiah Berlin essay other day, and she seemed to enjoy it, so maybe the history of ideas is more her thing. Or maybe she was just humouring me.

Here are some other books he might like to read to his baby:

David Copperfield

War and Peace (in the original Russian)

Shakespeare's Macbeth (in the original Russian translation)

The Old Testament

The New Testament

The In-Between Testament

The Postmodern Testament (the smash hit sequel to God's bestselling thriller New Testament)

GOD, by Mr S.Atan de Ville

Emily Dickinson's Collected Poems (one poem per night, printed on tissue paper, and lain ever-so-gently under their pillows. By their second birthday, they will have absorbed more poetry than some people will have in their lifetimes.)

Sophocles Oedipus Rex

Margaret Fulton's Guide to Home Cooking (Sung in a minor key, in rhyming couplets, with a penguin under each arm)

William Shakespeare's Margaret Fulton's Guide to Home Cooking (a little known work by the master playwright, translating Fulton's 20th century Australian English into 16th century English-English).

Ulysses (Through the wrong end of a gramophone, standing on a llama on a mountaintop, reciting it in German with an Irish accent, or Irish with a German accent)

Hamlet

Euclid's Theorems (Told to your baby through the medium of interpretative dance).

Sun Tzu's Art of War

Encyclopaedia Britannica (Backwards, thank you very much. The final volume, Zossiumus - Zzarbok is grossly neglected.)

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