Aged Out, Still In

For the last three years, April has been my favourite month — not for its mangoes or its lazy, stretched-out afternoons, but for the small, delicious ritual it ushered in. The drawing up of reading schedules. The curated list of books. The orders placed online, and then the quiet joy of waiting — watching for the courier, feeling the weight of each parcel, the unhurried pleasure of browsing through new spines and making tidy piles according to the reading schedule. April meant we were ready. We were beginning.

This April, I felt the vacuum.

Neev Academy, my son's school in Bangalore, hosts one of India's biggest children's literature festivals — the Neev Literature Festival — every year on the third weekend of September. And I'll admit it without hesitation: I wait for it more eagerly than my soon-to-be 7th grader does. There is something about the energy of that weekend — the buzz of young readers, the crackle of competitive joy, the sense that books are not a quiet, solitary affair but a loud, exhilarating, shared one — that gets under your skin and stays there.

The centerpiece of the entire build-up is the NLF Reading Challenge, which opens in April each year. It is designed for children in Grades 4–6, and the task is beautifully audacious: 30 books in 12 weeks. But the challenge is never just about the books. Woven through those three months are live Author Sessions — intimate, online interactions with some of the very writers whose books the children are reading. And believe me when I say this: there is something irreplaceable about the moment a child, having just finished a book, gets to look an author in the eye (through a screen, yes, but still) and ask why. Why did you write this? Why did she do that? What happened next, in your head? These sessions spark a different kind of reading — alive, curious, accountable.

And then there is the Quiz. The Quiz deserves its own paragraph.

There are two preliminary rounds held online, drawing participants from schools across India — hundreds of teams competing, reading, revising, debating over passages at kitchen tables and in school libraries. And then, at the Literature Festival itself, the top four teams face off in the Grand Finale. The quiz is hosted by the wonderfully sharp team at QShala, who have a rare gift for finding the heartbeat of each book — the cultural detail, the plot turn, the authorial intention — and building questions that are not just testing memory but rewarding genuine engagement. The questions are layered. The rounds are inventive. From rapid-fire to crossword puzzles where every answer belongs to a specific book from the challenge, the finale is interactive and keeps everyone on the edge of their seats.

As a parent in the audience, you are not safe either. The audience questions are tossed out like confetti, and the parents — yes, the parents — lunge for them with an eagerness that would embarrass no one. The competitiveness of the children is contagious. The whole tent vibrates. You can take a peek at what this looks like here: NLF Reading Challenge 2026 Grand Finale Quiz.

But the NLF is more than a literature festival. It is a celebration — of books, of reading, of the belief that stories matter — with two days of immersive author interactions, engaging performances, and creative workshops by some of the finest names in Indian and global children's literature. It is a gathering of spirits who do not read to pass time or earn praise or tick a box. They read because, for them, reading is living. The motto, if it had one, would simply be: To live is to read.

So when the first email of the NLF Reading Challenge 2026 quietly appeared in my inbox this morning — that familiar subject line, that familiar hope in the sender's name — I felt a pang I hadn't expected. A small, sharp grief.

My son will be in 7th grade this year. The challenge is for Grades 4–6. He has aged out of the bracket.

I sat with that for a moment. Three Aprils of reading schedules. Three summers of bantering over books and authors, of lobbing quiz questions at each other across the dining table, of discovering — through the safe remove of fiction — things about each other we might never have stumbled upon otherwise. I have learned more about my son through his reading than through almost anything else. Books were our medium, our shared language, our back door into conversations that might have otherwise had no entry point.

There is something about fiction — its third-person distance, its fictional worlds — that makes it easier to say what you cannot say directly. For pre-teens and teenagers, who are often adrift in feelings they have no words for, a story can name the thing. A character's fear can give voice to their own. A fictional anguish can stand in for a real one. This is what reading together gave us: a way to speak without speaking, to understand without having to explain. I think of that as one of the deepest gifts a parent and child can share.

And so, even though my son cannot register for the Challenge this year, his mother most certainly can scour the reading list. I've already begun. Every year, despite our bookshelves heaving with hundreds of titles, we have never found more than two or three books on the NLF list that he has already read. That, more than anything, speaks to the extraordinary care with which the reading team at Neev curates their selection — 30 books that feel genuinely discovered, not obvious, not predictable, not merely acclaimed but chosen, with love and belief and generosity. You can explore the NLF's full archive of shortlisted books here and you'll see what I mean.

This summer will be quieter. There will be no official challenge, no countdown to preliminary rounds, no frantic last-week re-reading. But there will still be a stack of books on the shelf. There will still be long afternoons. And if I'm lucky — if we're both lucky — there will still be the occasional word volley across the table, the competitive gleam, the moment when one of us looks up from a page and says: you have to read this.

Some things don't need a bracket.