Something strange is going on with my six-year-old daughter’s reading habits. Until a few days ago, she had no reading habits. Now she suddenly has her face stuck in all sorts of books that are not age-appropriate. This is especially striking because Evangeline has always been drawn to the screen. Her appetite for movies—watched not on a television set but on a laptop, at close range—has always exceeded what one would normally expect from a little kid. At some point, when she was three or four, before her younger brother was born, I turned to my wife as we departed for a night out and remarked that she no longer cried when we left.

“She knows she is getting movies,” Elizabeth said.

“Is that a good thing?”

“Her not crying hysterically when we leave is a good thing.”

“Yes, but when we are gone, shouldn’t we ask the babysitter to actually play with her? I mean, once we are out the door, won’t she come around to just playing with someone, and not watching a movie? We are paying her, after all.”

No response. I let it drop. The unstated thought was that we were often afraid of our daughter’s temper, and it seemed—how to put this? unbrave?—to ask a young woman to take on a task that we approached with trepidation. And what if she didn’t stop crying? Our night out would be ruined.

We did set limits. We used movies as a form of reward and as a means of punishment. The first words that Evangeline ever wrote came the summer after her younger brother was born—not a high point of good behavior—when we banned any kind of screen time for a whole month. The results were fairly good, but then, one day, I walked into a room to discover her carefully writing out a phrase with marker on a piece of cardboard: “I WANT MOVIES.”

The terrible image of her standing by a road, displaying the sign to passing cars, formed in my mind: my daughter as a media panhandler.

All this emphasis on the screen has made me root for the advent of her reading. She has progressed in fits and starts, neither lagging nor being superlative. I figure that she’ll read the way I read: when she finds a book that interests her, she will dive in and read it non-stop. And then she will go through a disinterested period, until that next engaging book comes along.

Or so I thought.

**

Things changed when I acquired a Kindle—the paper-white model. Not bad! I had never owned one. At night, in bed, I had sometimes used a little clamp-on light—like a tiny street lamp—to read, but that was never comfortable. With the Kindle, I could read in bed when the lights were out. Not a cutting-edge observation, I know, but one has technological epiphanies when one has them. I decided to inaugurate this device with a book that I have long put off reading because I knew it would be a narcotic treat: the first installment of Robert Caro’s multi-volume biography of Lyndon Johnson, “The Path to Power.”

One night, as I happily read in the dark, my daughter migrated to our room, as she often does, saying she couldn’t sleep. She got in bed beside me. I kept reading. She stared at the screen for a while.

“Wait, I’m not done,” she said, when I reached up to turn the (figurative) page.

“You’re reading along?”

“Sort of.”

She watched the screen, observing the pages turn for a while, and drifted off to sleep.

The next night, she was back, lying in the dark beside me, her face illuminated by the screen’s dim glow, staring up at the backlit words. She tried to adjust the font size. She asked to try out my reading glasses.

“Stop stalling, or you have to go back to your room,” I said harshly.

When I next turned the page, she said, “Wait. I’m not done.”

As an experiment, I said, “O.K., tell me when.”

After a minute, she responded, “O.K., turn the page.”

I said that she could turn the pages herself, when she was ready. Thereafter, I would read a page, then lie there for a while, wondering if my daughter was playing with me, which seemed likely, or if she was actually trying to read the words. There were some anxious moments over Lady Bird Johnson’s childhood: “Aside from Negro playmates,” wrote Caro, “her mother was her only companion.”

I didn’t want to have to answer questions about that word.

No questions came. This is a pantomime of reading, I thought, just another way to keep from going to sleep. Periodically, her hand would reach up and tap the surface of the screen to turn the page.

It happened again the next night, when I was in the middle of a passage concerning Lyndon Johnson’s courtship of and marriage to Lady Bird Johnson. My daughter is interested in such things. If there is anything about dating or kissing in a movie, she puts her hands over my eyes, or looks at me with an outrageous expression of embarrassment, as though I were the one who should not be exposed to these facts of life.

On this night, she now and then asked me to say a word. She got through a few pages—including a tidbit about Johnson cajoling and browbeating his shy fiancée, Lady Bird, to agree to an instant wedding. In the middle of the ceremony, his best man “dashed across the street to a Sears, Roebuck store and brought back a tray of inexpensive wedding bands—the one she chose cost $2.50—to complete the ceremony.”

When I started to turn that page, she said, “Wait! I’m not done.“

I lay there, wondering what in the world she might make of “Sears, Roebuck.” Or what she would make of the name Lady Bird. And what about this abrupt, hectoring way of getting married?

**

Caro’s biography casts in a new light the carousel of pride and anxiety that parents experience while assessing the progress of their kids. On one hand, you have to admire a poor country boy who, in the Horatio Alger tradition, pulls himself up on the strength of his own work and ingenuity to become a congressman, senator, and President. But that is the picture only when seen from a distance. Up close, at the granular level, the level at which Caro’s narrative proceeds, Johnson is mostly despicable. The book made me vow to be less focused on accomplishment. Fortunately, day-to-day life also proceeds at the granular level, though without the luxury of being able to put the narrative down, and these concerns fell by the wayside.

Just the other day, Evangeline shocked me by picking up Louis Menand’s collection of essays “American Studies”—the actual book—and peering at its pages.

I was sure that this was some sort of pose, or a lark. It was impossible to imagine that she was actually reading it. But having picked it up, she then took the book outside and, as we put her brother in the car, stood with it open, in her hands, looking engrossed. She kept reading it in the car, until she finally put it down with a sigh.