Arne Duncan, in an video interview with Scholastic News, talks about the importance of parents reading to kids, what he reads to his kids, and what his parents read to him. It seems there’s a lot of Harry Potter getting covered in the Duncan household these days, and Dr. Seuss has had his day.
As for what the secretary’s parents read to him as a boy, Duncan mentions J.R.R. Tolkien, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and—if I understood him correctly—Moby Dick. Ambitious stuff for a kid, though maybe the secretary meant that he tackled some of those a bit later in adolescence, on his own. “I was just really, really lucky to grow up in a household filled with great books and two parents who wanted to read to us,” he said.
Here’s the clip: