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How a capybara took over the Scholastic Book Fair

What this furry favorite can teach us about kids’ reading and writing.

This story originally appeared in Kids Today, Vox’s newsletter about kids, for everyone. Sign up here for future editions.

The Scholastic Book Fair is a big deal at my older kid’s school.

A couple of times a year, the auditorium gets transformed into a kid-friendly bookstore, and the elementary-schoolers get out of their regular classes to shop for their favorite titles — just like many millennial and Gen Z readers remember from our youth.

This time around, my kid was excited to come home with Buffalo Fluffalo, a bestselling picture book about a self-important buffalo who gets cut down to size. But the real must-have item on my 7-year-old’s list was not a book at all, but this furry capybara diary.

The fur journal (I am trying to make a portmanteau here and failing) is a nationwide sensation, consistently one of the most popular items at book fairs, according to Laura Lundgren, chief marketing officer for the children’s book group at Scholastic. “Kids are obsessed with these diaries,” she told me.

Selling over 4 million copies a year, the journals feel like a sign of the times — for good and ill. On the one hand, elementary-schoolers’ reading scores continue to languish, and kids are less and less likely to pick up a book for fun. In a time of widespread concern about the decline of reading, the idea that kids are choosing a capybara over a storybook feels a little dispiriting.

On the other hand, in the face of increased AI dominance over all of our lives, the popularity of a physical, analog journal may tell us something hopeful about kids’ enduring desire for self-expression. And it’s a reminder that even as adults try to impose our priorities and anxieties on kids, they have their own lives and preferences that have nothing to do with us.

With more than 100,000 events every year around the........

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