Sophie on the joy of reading and encouraging others to find it…
Image by So 2026 is the Year of Reading in the UK. The National Literacy Trust, with perhaps a lavish slice of generosity, describes it as a Department of Education initiative. Supported, it says by “sixty passionate partners.”
Whoa, there. Sixty? A passionate sixty? That’s some going. Add to that the unfortunate branding slogan, Go All In, and you have a serious risk of sniggering in the back row. It’s even the name of their dedicated website.
(One of the downsides of reading a lot, as I do, is that you are ridiculously ready to pick up the slightest hint of a smutty joke.)
WHY A UK YEAR OF READING?
The website describes its objective.
This is : “a collective impact campaign to tackle the steep decline in reading enjoyment among children, young people and adults that will reach into every corner of society: schools, communities, libraries, workplaces, the justice system, and early years settings.”
Reading enjoyment is the key phrase here.
The UK puts its adult literacy at 99% in World Bank and UNESCO statistics. (In this we mirror the whole of Europe and the vast majority of the American Continent.) Our perceived problem now is helpfully identified by Passionate Partner, The Reading Agency, based on their 2025 Survey of Adult Reading. “Just under half of UK adults say they aren’t readers.”
Oh, they’re reading all right, probably for work and day to day survival. Just not for fun. As a result they are a lot more miserable, lonely and disconnected than they need to be.
Specifically the Report concludes: “Compared to non-readers, regular readers are 86% more likely to report feeling a sense of belong to their community, 58% feeling generally happy, 51% finding it easy to relax and 45% sleeping well.
“Additionally, 35% are more likely to say they don’t feel lonely and 32% not anxious or depressed.”
So that’s two of our society’s great scourges, where a spot more reading might reverse the blight.
MY EARLY READING LIFE
I learned to read early, My mother, who came late to motherhood, said straightforwardly that she hated reading aloud. So there was no alternative but for me to learn — and as fast as I could.
By the time I got to primary school, I was way ahead of the curriculum. Consequently, when it was my turn to read out loud from our primer, I whipped through the day’s paragraph. And then went back to the story I actually wanted to read, from the classroom shelf.
My parents let me read what I wanted. I picked up books that looked interesting in the library. Nobody ever said I had to stick to the children’s section and I got into Georgette Heyer and Ngaio Marsh pretty early. I also learned which authors to avoid. (After `Lord of the Flies, I passed on The Spire for a good ten years.)
There was never a time in my life when reading was either a bore or a chore. I was so lucky.
JUST READ
I realised exactly how how lucky I had been some years ago, watching a programme by Michael Rosen called Just Read. ( I recommend it.)
Rosen visited a small primary school in Wales where there were a number of children who weren’t reading happily, for a wide range of reasons. The one that made me wince was a girl, like me, already reading fluently. Only she couldn’t find anything to read at school that was OK for her age and not boring! So she just stopped.
That could so easily have been me.
But another, even tougher, story was the poor headteacher who clearly had to get his children to master a certain vocabulary.
Accordingly, he bought in “reading scheme books” which covered all the basics and were expensive. He was on a budget, of course. “So books that are read for enjoyment tend to get left to the end of the queue,” he said sadly.
ENJOYMENT
Enjoyment is not a trivial word, when it comes to reading. It embraces anything that might interest us. Fiction yes, certainly. But speculation, ideas, finding out stuff.
This is not for training purposes. Not even to use, though what we find may well turn out to be useful in a thousand different and unexpected ways.
But this is for the sheer pleasure of a journey into new space and time.
And we know that reading for enjoyment, quite literally, broadens the mind, constructs new pathways in the brain. It can makes us feel. It helps us grow. It can trigger invention, adventure and creation. And it can give us a place of rest and recuperation before some mighty task or after a terrible loss.
CAN WE HELP?
So far the campaign seems a bit of a scatter gun. Thoroughly admirable and full of suggestions but not exactly a battle plan.
Both the Go All In website and The Reading Agency are seeking volunteers to help spread the word. As is the Society of Authors. The Reading Agency’s target seems to be the public libraries, at least for the first three months of the year. School get mentioned a lot. To be fair, the Go All In website has some great ideas about who to target and possible ways to do so. But basically, the volunteers have to choose their own needy non-readers and then create their own route through the maze.
My dear BBC Radio 4 has been mentioning that 2026 is the Year of Reading constantly. I heard Jeanette Winterson talk about it on her Pick of the Year. The Today Programme has been covering it by having reader-listeners talk about one special book’s particular effect on them. I was fascinated. But then I am an avid reader and not the target audience. Maybe some non-readers will feel equally intrigued and pick up on of the books. But it seems a long shot.
HAY FESTIVAL WHEEZE
A project by the Hay Festival strikes me as more promising, even inspired. It’s quite a short online questionnaire. It invites anyone to choose books they’ve loved in some truly interesting categories, and to say what the books did for them.
They call it The Pleasure List and I really love the tagline Share the books that bring you joy.They are going to use the data they gather to create “a selection of the very best books to inspire new readers”.
Not hoary old classics. Not Booker Prize Winners. Not deep, depressing doorstops lauded by the literati. Books that have brought people joy. We are promised an event at the Hay Festival to celebrate its publication.
Now, that sounds like a plan. If people enthuse about the books they truly love, it might even work!
Sophie
I’m too old to have had those basic reading books inflicted on me. My memories of school reading are happier. Thankfully my mother – an avid reader – started taking me to the library when I was five years old and I was quickly addicted to the page-turning books of Enid Blyton. She may be looked down on now, but she made the weekly trip to Boots library on Saturday morning the most exciting part of the week. My only problem was running out of books long before the week was up and I took myself to the wonderful public library very quickly. I remember a school trip in what is now Year Six for everyone to get library cards. For some of the class it was their first visit. For me it was a second home and my library card was dog-eared!
So were my library cards, Liz. We had a little library at the very end of the street and I was allowed to go on my own.
Once, on a wet Saturday, I remember taking out 4 books in the morning and trying to change them before closing time! When the librarians stopped laughing, they said they’d have to make a new rule now that you couldn’t change a library book on the same day as you took it out. The (hand- cranked of course) filing system couldn’t cope.
Our library was quite a distance away. I don’t remember what age I started going. I do remember one day when I walked there (as a teenager) and discovered they’d laid a new floor and stiletto heels were banned. I was wearing same. So I walked back home, changed my shoes and walked back to the library. Stupid, of course. I should just have taken my shoes off and walked in in my stockinged feet. Like Liz, I devoured Enid Blyton as a primary school kid. Also the Lilac Fairy Book and all its sibling volumes (which I have since bought in gorgeous Folio Society hardback versions).