Happy New Year and, even more fervently – from my standpoint as a natural-born and then heavily-nurtured bookworm – happy National Year of Reading to you!
For thus has the year of our Lord 2026 been designated by the National Literary Trust, to encourage what statistics have recently shown to be a skill at risk of becoming if not lost then at least arcane far sooner than we’d ever have believed possible.
Reading for pleasure is becoming less common across all ages but especially, as you might expect, given their digital nativity, amongst children and younger adults.
The latest annual survey by the National Literacy Trust found that only a third of people between the ages of eight and 18 said they enjoyed reading in their spare time, and just a fifth of them reported reading something daily. A few years ago, the Progress in International Reading Report by the Department of Education found that, while the international average of children reporting that they “very much liked” reading was 46 per cent, England’s crotch fruit came in at just 29 per cent.
The keen-eyed amongst you may already have spotted that there has been an omission. What is meant by “reading for pleasure”? It it really the reading of books for pleasure? Otherwise, everyone is reading for pleasure all the time; WhatsApp messages, Instagram captions and comments, X posts, Facebook if you’re old, email correspondence if you’re even older, even newspaper articles and columns sometimes!
And it is this which points to one of the major, if wildly counter-intuitive, dangers of any campaign to get people reading: it makes it too defining a feature.
Take it from me: if you’re a bookworm, you can get away with murder. Probably not literally (though I have read enough thrillers in my time to believe with some confidence that I could avoid all the obvious pitfalls) but metaphorically for sure, and big time.
Parents and teachers leave you alone, and the latter will assume you are far, far cleverer than you are. A fancy vocabulary will allow you to paper over crack in your knowledge and encourage them – and later, interviewers and employers for jobs you should not get – to give you the benefit of the doubt time and time again.
And I don’t mean to do myself or the rest of my kindred down. Reading does improve a human being, in all sorts of ways, and in ways that only long-form works of imagination (though I realise now there has been another assumption introduced, for I am evidently talking primarily about fiction, about novels) can do.
They expose us to other consciousness – writers’, characters’ – and make unavoidable the knowledge that every single person in the world has, like you, an inner world that is as vivid and complicated and important to them as yours is to you, and without which (much resented at times, frankly) certainty there can be no true empathy.
They allow you to live a thousand lives and travel to a thousand places and thus get a sense of perspective about your tiny place in the world and its history that stops you becoming – gosh, how do I put this delicately? – quite such a prick as you might otherwise have been. That’s that fancy vocabulary that I was telling you about right there, you see?
But a love of reading should never be conflated with intelligence. Reading simply doesn’t suit everyone. People, life – they suit some people and some lives better. That’s where non-bookworms (I’m told) become socially aware, mature, well-rounded, functioning human beings. On top of – get this – being good at other things, and jobs, too. Imagine. Goddamn frightening.
I have been as guilty of this conflation as anyone, in the 14-year, one-woman domestic war I have been waging against illiteracy in my own home. Only recently have I accepted that, despite being the offspring of two of the most bookish people you could hope to find, my son is not and never will be a bookworm. He is, as he told us firmly a few years ago, “a computers person.” And only even more recently have I accepted that he is not, therefore, a moron.
He is, though, a person who has been exposed to books. Who has had unrestricted access to as many volumes and genres as could possibly have snagged any latent interest he had. He is as much of a reader as he was ever designed to be, and he – whatever he currently reckons – is incredibly lucky to be so, and we are incredibly lucky to have been able to do that for him, even if we didn’t always go about it in quite the right (calm, semi-detached) way.
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And it is this that, when it comes to bringing books and reading for pleasure to children, that we must keep at the forefront of our minds: the goal is not to make them into bookworms/beacons of a narrow and often mistaken form of intelligence.
The goal is to show them what is out there, to support them in mastering the fundamentally bonkers art of staring at black marks on slices of dead tree and hallucinating furiously for hours and creating the space and the silence that makes it possible for them to find out truly whether this is something they like, instead of ploughing ahead in ignorance of even the possibility.
It will be gloriously revelatory for some and start them on a lifetime of blinkered obsession (welcome!). For others it will be another string to their self-entertainment bow. For a few it will be a very occasional pleasure indeed. What matters is that they all have the opportunity to find out where the truth lies for them.
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