Children will read if they see Mum and Dad doing it

Adult book-phobes will scoff at Michael Gove's ambition for schoolchildren to read 50 volumes a year, says Rowan Pelling in The Telegraph

Some years ago I was sent to Majorca courtesy of a Radio 4 book programme. My task was to wander up and down beaches with a microphone, interviewing basking holidaymakers on their reading habits.
Now, you and I might have thought it would be more fruitful to tour the pool-sides of Provence, where lily-white BBC producers lie under olive trees with battered copies of Proust – but Radio 4 is always loath to admit what Radio 4 is. So I spent hours seeking out the few vacationers clutching volumes by writers who might vaguely qualify as literary (Martina Cole and Wilbur Smith), and most of them were being used as sunscreens. The men I talked to said it was unusual if they managed to read one book a year. Although they were doing better than some. Victoria Beckham declared in one 2005 interview: "I've never read a book in my life."


So, I wonder what the adult book-phobes will make of Michael Gove's ambition for schoolchildren to read 50 volumes a year.
We spend so much time lamenting children's preference for their DS to Roald Dahl that we often don't note that many parents read little more taxing than their messages on Facebook.

One friend who handed out books in the street to mark World Book Day earlier this month said mostpassers-by behaved as if he was offering them poison. Yet, it's pretty obvious that one major reason children don't read books is because their parents don't either. It's hard to believe that books can be more gripping than moving images unless you see that superior fascination convincingly demonstrated.

My older son looked at me like I was a Martian when I told him recently that no film ever made was as spellbinding as my favourite book. The most interesting bit of research I've read about the factors that play a key role in children's future success found that money and marital harmony were less significant than having book-lined shelves. I somehow doubt that Kindles and iPads will foster the same get-ahead attitude. So, while I look forward to my son being urged to read a book a week, I think Gove's plan will reap richer rewards if parents are set the same homework.

Of course everyone would read more books if they were, in the words of breathy blurbs the world over, "unputdownable", but rarely is this genuinely the case. So I was interested to get on the train the other day at the same time as a forthright woman on a mobile, who appeared to be giving a journalist a list of her 10 top thrillers. I settled in for a good, long eavesdrop as she raved about one she'd just read. "I never say this about first novels," she said, "but I really could not put this book down, it is just so brilliant. It's about a woman with amnesia who finds a journal she's written to herself…"

That's when I realised that I'd been sent the same book myself in proof form and – by heck – I read it in one, short, pulse-raising session and immediately passed my copy on to a friend. The amnesia genre already has some notable works, such as Alex Garland's Coma and Christopher Nolan's film Memento, but S J Watson's Before I Go to Sleep is an exemplary addition. Incidentally, curiosity overcame me at the end of my journey so I tapped the book proselytiser on the shoulder. It was the crime writer Sophie Hannah, so she should know.
More at The Telegraph.