Reading for pleasure is hugely important for children – it builds resilience, happiness, empathy and communication skills, contributing to improved life chances. Research proves this. So, as a children’s publisher, it’s concerning that children today read less than any previous generation (“Children are reading less than ever, says report”, News).
With more than 380,000 children in the UK not having a book of their own, we urgently need to find ways to offer pupils access to a diverse range of books. If a child’s parents cannot afford books, if there isn’t a library in their school, if teachers are not supported and encouraged to share stories in class, and children don’t have opportunities to visit a public library, how can they be expected to read for pleasure?
To help build a culture of reading for pleasure, Puffin has launched the second year of Puffin World of Stories in partnership with the National Literacy Trust, providing more than 24,000 new books to 80 primary schools in some of the UK’s most disadvantaged areas, alongside training to help support teachers.
A book, a story, can help a child step into someone else’s shoes, understand that they are not alone, experience a magical adventure and travel to new worlds. Through stories, children can learn about the world, while sitting in their classroom. We have a collective responsibility to ensure that children who could benefit the most from access to books don’t miss out.
Francesca Dow, managing director, Penguin Random House Children’s UK
London WC2
Is it really so terrible that, apparently, just a quarter of under-18s read every day? What place do adults have to tell teenagers how often they should read for enjoyment?
When I was young, the experts could tell me what texts to study, but what and when I read in my spare time was none of their business. There are a variety of interests and healthy hobbies a person could have and, if they prefer that more than reading a “classic”, it doesn’t make them any more stupid than older generations. You enjoy what you enjoy.
Frankly, children have to plough through so many uninspiring novels and poems throughout their education that English literature lessons can turn them off reading altogether. To many youngsters, reading has simply been made painfully boring.
Emilie Lamplough
Trowbridge, Wiltshire
Beard v Johnson, a classic
In your reporting of the revelation that Mary Beard has been “black-balled” by the government from the board of the British Museum (“Beard blocked by No 10 as British Museum trustee”, News), I would commend Beard’s gallant refusal to make the thing personal, but not the coyness of your penultimate paragraph.
Beard administered a drubbing to Boris Johnson, our modern Pericles, at the Greece-Rome debate in 2016, something many regularly re-watch with glee. Suffice it to say that nobody likes a bad loser.
Terry Walsh
Cartagena, Murcia
Spain
Why was Labour silent?
Tory austerity policies haven’t just “stifled” the lives of young and poor people, they have resulted in the premature deaths of tens of thousands of our older and poorer citizens (“It’s official: Tory austerity has stifled the lives of young and poor Britons”, Comment). In addition, cuts in central government support for local councils of more than 40% in the last decade have made it very difficult for them to respond to the major increases in demand resulting from the impact of these cuts.
Nick Cohen rightly highlights the failure of Labour to mount a solid attack on these Tory policies. But it’s not just Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour leadership that have failed us: most metropolitan districts have Labour-controlled councils which, like mine in the London borough of Camden, have been shouting about the cuts to their budgets for years, without any attempt to bring this to public attention.
If all the leaders of these councils had gone to Downing Street and demanded that the cuts be reversed, that might have stopped the disaster now unfolding.
Labour MPs, especially those in more deprived areas, should have been saying that immigration is not the problem, and nor is the EU: the poverty is entirely the fault of the Tory austerity policies. Quite simply, Labour got it wrong right from the start; it should have rejected the EU referendum as a Tory ruse to solve an internal Tory party problem. Like many Tory policies, it failed.
David Reed
London NW3
Golden goals
Greg Wood’s interesting article about the increase in scoring rates in US sports, as against the relative stagnation in European football, misses the point (“Meeting expectations relies on more than just a bumper year for mosquitoes”, Sport).
The reason football is the most popular sport is the rarity of a goal. This makes it something to be celebrated, and is why fans leap around and hug strangers. In a game that ends 104-102, I would not have the energy to celebrate every point.
Martin Waters
Bridgwater, Somerset
Women, keep shouting
Vanessa Thorpe’s article about the feminist conference in Oxford last Saturday was wonderful and moving, connecting the event, the history and the issues (“Echoes of 1970 as feminist row breaks out at Ruskin celebration”, News).
I was at the conference with my mother, who went on the march in 1970. There was a lot of shouting at the start of the conference, and my mother said it was just like the old days. I don’t know that I’ve been anywhere else where women have expressed themselves so freely and loudly. It was bloody brilliant.
This says a lot about how women’s voices are normally silenced in daily life. We are expected to keep quiet and be grateful for the rights won by equality campaigners over the years.
But functionally, those hard-won legal rights have not led to liberation. We have the right to work full time, to pay for childcare that costs all our wages. We have the right to share parental leave with our partners, but it means giving up part of our maternity leave. We have the right to control our own finances, apart from women claiming universal credit, who are forced to resign their financial independence because this benefit is claimed jointly with their partner. So women, keep shouting; we have a long way to go.
Deborah Fajerman
London SE26
Quiet, please
In her entertaining article on misophonia (“My search for a noise-free life”, Magazine), Emma Beddington could have gone back even farther than Thomas Carlyle and Octavia Hill to support her case. The French philosopher Blaise Pascal (1623-62) went so far as to claim: “All the misfortunes of men arise from one single thing: that they are unable to sit quietly in a room alone.”
Jack Critchlow
Torquay, Devon
Emma Beddington’s enumeration of sources of noise omits one new epidemic of very serious, and deliberate, through-the-eardrums assault on human happiness. This is the driver-actuated “flutter valve” that antisocial people can have fitted in the exhaust systems of their vehicles. It costs only a couple of hundred quid to make sure that no one can ignore your passing of their home, school, workplace, park, nature reserve, bus queue, creche, whatever.
This sonic weapon does not make your car or motorbike more efficient (or even go more rapidly), but it is selling like hot cakes to the wheeled narcissist community. Moreover, because it is electrically activated, you can switch it off it whenever you think prosecution might be a hazard, or when you are in your own neighbourhood.
James Barbour
Belfast
