Prose fiction is something you build up from 26 letters and a handful of punctuation marks, and you, and you alone, using your imagination, create a world and people it and look out through other eyes. ADD BOOKS TO LIBRARIAN PRO 4 TVWhen you watch TV or see a film, you are looking at things happening to other people. (Also, do not do what this author did when his 11-year-old daughter was into RL Stine, which is to go and get a copy of Stephen King’s Carrie, saying if you liked those you’ll love this! Holly read nothing but safe stories of settlers on prairies for the rest of her teenage years, and still glares at me when Stephen King’s name is mentioned.)Īnd the second thing fiction does is to build empathy. We need our children to get onto the reading ladder: anything that they enjoy reading will move them up, rung by rung, into literacy. You’ll wind up with a generation convinced that reading is uncool and worse, unpleasant. Well-meaning adults can easily destroy a child’s love of reading: stop them reading what they enjoy, or give them worthy-but-dull books that you like, the 21st-century equivalents of Victorian “improving” literature. And not everyone has the same taste as you. Fiction you do not like is a route to other books you may prefer. Do not discourage children from reading because you feel they are reading the wrong thing. This is the first time the child has encountered it. A hackneyed, worn-out idea isn’t hackneyed and worn out to them. They can find the stories they need to, and they bring themselves to stories. There are no bad authors for children, that children like and want to read and seek out, because every child is different. Comics have been decried as fostering illiteracy. I’ve seen it happen over and over Enid Blyton was declared a bad author, so was RL Stine, so were dozens of others. Every now and again it becomes fashionable among some adults to point at a subset of children’s books, a genre, perhaps, or an author, and to declare them bad books, books that children should be stopped from reading. I don’t think there is such a thing as a bad book for children. And that means, at its simplest, finding books that they enjoy, giving them access to those books, and letting them read them. The simplest way to make sure that we raise literate children is to teach them to read, and to show them that reading is a pleasurable activity. People who cannot understand each other cannot exchange ideas, cannot communicate, and translation programs only go so far. There were noises made briefly, a few years ago, about the idea that we were living in a post-literate world, in which the ability to make sense out of written words was somehow redundant, but those days are gone: words are more important than they ever were: we navigate the world with words, and as the world slips onto the web, we need to follow, to communicate and to comprehend what we are reading. Once you learn that, you’re on the road to reading everything. To discover that reading per se is pleasurable. And it forces you to learn new words, to think new thoughts, to keep going. The drive to know what happens next, to want to turn the page, the need to keep going, even if it’s hard, because someone’s in trouble and you have to know how it’s all going to end … that’s a very real drive. Literate people read fiction.įiction has two uses. But there are very real correlations.Īnd I think some of those correlations, the simplest, come from something very simple. It’s not one to one: you can’t say that a literate society has no criminality. And certainly couldn’t read for pleasure. The prison industry needs to plan its future growth – how many cells are they going to need? How many prisoners are there going to be, 15 years from now? And they found they could predict it very easily, using a pretty simple algorithm, based on asking what percentage of 10 and 11-year-olds couldn’t read. I was once in New York, and I listened to a talk about the building of private prisons – a huge growth industry in America. Because, they tell us, everything changes when we read.Īnd it’s that change, and that act of reading that I’m here to talk about tonight. Which supports literacy programs, and libraries and individuals and nakedly and wantonly encourages the act of reading. And I am even more biased as a British citizen.Īnd I’m here giving this talk tonight, under the auspices of the Reading Agency: a charity whose mission is to give everyone an equal chance in life by helping people become confident and enthusiastic readers. But I am much, much more biased as a reader.
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