Welcome to Close Reads! In this series, Leah Schnelbach and their guests dig into the tiny, weird moments of pop culture—from books to theme songs to viral internet hits—that have burrowed into our minds, found rent-stabilized apartments, started community gardens, and refused to be forced out by corporate interests. This time out, Vanessa Armstrong looks back at her relationship with Book It! and forward to creating book-based memories with her daughter.
If you’re an adult of a certain age, you’re no doubt familiar with the BOOK IT! program where—if your elementary school teacher deemed you read what you said you did—Pizza Hut treated you to a free personal pan pizza.
I am one of those adults. As a child, I studiously wrote down in crude cursive the books I read, got the list approved by my first-grade teacher, and proudly wore my Book It! button to the local Pizza Hut joint where I topped my red plastic cup with too many refills of Pepsi as I dived into my suitably sized deep dish pizza.
Book It! left an indelible mark on me and, for better and worse, helped define my relationship with reading. I always loved reading as a kid, so I didn’t need the program to amp up my page count. What Book It! did, however, was make reading something communal. I didn’t have many friends when I was a child, but I could talk to my classmates about Book It!—everyone worked to get that star on their button! I remember asking other students, students who usually teased me more than not, what books they read to get their free pizza; and I remember the pleasant shock I felt when they answered me with thoughtless friendliness, a response that felt so elusive to me in other conversations. Book It! is also how I first read The Boxcar Children series, and how I realized I read over 100 books in one elementary school year.
Buy the Book
Witch King
While I’ll always miss some parts of Book It!, I still get that reading-related high through other means. I am a member of a book club, a monthly Zoom affair (no two members live in the same place) where we actually all read and talk about the book assigned for the month. I’ve also gone to a silent reading club meeting near me, an event where folks gather in a coffee shop or bar, don’t talk to each other, and quietly read. (Yes, you can chat with others before and after the set reading time—there are no rules against it! But as an aggressive introvert who still likes people, I love sitting around other book lovers and then leaving with little more than a quick “thank you” and a smile to the organizer.)
I have, in other words, found a reading family as an adult.
The program left such a mark on me, in fact, that the Book It! button is one of the few things from childhood that I have to this day. You can imagine my reaction then, when American Dolls came out with a Book It! kit for their new “historical” dolls from the 1990s. The toy also likely confirms that I’m not the only Millennial of an older persuasion who loved to be rewarded with free pizza for reading. I might be in a small subset of geriatric book-loving Millennials, however, who bought the absurdly priced accessory—$42 after shipping and handling!—for “my toddler” (aka myself)… for a doll we don’t own.
We were both excited, however, when the set arrived (granted, pretty much anything new excites a two-year-old, but still) and my daughter took the tiny book from the set and put it in her room, next to her other treasured reading materials. It was the tiny pizza, however, that truly took her fancy, so much so that she now “serves” it to our dog and me when she sits us down for tea parties.
My daughter’s interest in the pizza part of the reading experience isn’t surprising given she’s only two years old. It seems, however, that though the program apparently still exists, it doesn’t have the effect on kids these days as it did for me and others. That’s probably okay; there are places to share your love of books out there. When she’s older, and if she ends up loving reading as much as her mom (a strong possibility given her love of A Very Hungry Caterpillar and Ten Little Ladybugs, though it’s okay if she has other hobbies instead!), there’s BookTok and reading-focused podcasts, and undoubtedly a number of other things that I’m not aware of, or don’t yet exist.
Maybe she’ll form her own book club with her friends, where I can supply the pizza.
Vanessa Armstrong is a writer with bylines at The New York Times, The LA Times, StarTrek.com and other publications. She lives in Los Angeles with her daughter, dog and husband, and she loves books more than most things. You can find more of her work on her website or follow her on Twitter @vfarmstrong.
