My earliest memories are all of reading. Being scared and fascinated by Sendak’s Wild Things and clinging onto my big brother for moral support so I could get to the end. Longing desperately for a lollipop just like the one from The Very Hungry Caterpillar. Lying in bed listening to my mum reading me Pippi Longstocking even though I should really have been asleep an hour ago but desperately needing just one more page. Going to the library on the bus with my grandmother and being allowed to choose absolutely anything I wanted. Stories wove their way through my earliest days and memories and sometimes I am taken by surprise by how much I suddenly remember a book I had completely forgotten. I saw the cover of Goodnight Moon last week, and all of a sudden I was four years old, saying goodnight to a bowl full of mush. It was visceral and I knew every word.

“You are a chain of books that stretch back to your first days and on towards your last ones.”

The Power of Reading

I know that reading by myself and with others is certainly what made me a writer. It’s what made me able to argue and critique, structure and plot, create and imagine. But that’s not the biggest thing reading gave me. Reading for pleasure threads itself through your life. It’s not just one experience – it becomes part of you. You are a chain of books that stretch back to your first days and on towards your last ones. The stories build you, they make you understand, they connect you to your family, your friends, your life, your culture, to other worlds and other people and other lives.

The Pleasure of Reading

That word – pleasure. It’s so important. Because I think that books have probably given me more collective joy than anything else – the ability to pick up a book and delve into a new world, or a new feeling, or a new life. Reading is a freedom, it’s control, it’s choice, it’s being in charge of what you want to feel and when. What can be better than that? That’s why I feel it’s so important for children to have control over what they read – by all means introduce them to new books and new authors, but let them make choices without judgement. If you don’t like a certain book, but they love it, then that’s what matters. They get pleasure from it. If you try to create rules and boundaries for that pleasure, it becomes something else. Let them choose, let them read widely, let them read for them and only them.

“Reading is a freedom, it’s control, it’s choice, it’s being in charge of what you want to feel and when. What can be better than that?”

Ruby’s Christmas Adventure will be published as a gift to children everywhere from Katya Balen and Pickatale, starting on December 1, 2022.