11/12/2022 0 Comments Bookworm adventures biggest wordWhen she was about three, we suggested she “read” her picture books to herself when she woke up, hoping we might get a lie-in past 6am. Instead of “again”, her typical request was “more”. And, unlike other children, she never had a favourite book. I strongly believe that swapping the sexes in these male-dominated books helped her, from a very young age, to enjoy reading to see herself more easily in the books I was reading to her and identify more with the main characters. Her imagination has not been restricted by her gender: she writes the stories she has read.įlora with her treasures. She writes about brave female heroines going on adventures and fighting scary female adversaries. To this day, when Flora writes her own stories, her robots, dinosaurs and wolves are always female. Shockingly, I did it with a pen, so that anyone else reading those books to her would read them that way, too. But at the time, I merely decided to swap all the pronouns in her books. And the male characters spoke more often.Įventually, I would carry out a big piece of research on this topic, first for the Observer and then for the Guardian. It didn’t seem to matter how recently the books had been published, most of the characters were male – especially if they were powerful. It was rare to meet a female heroine – rarer still to encounter a female enemy or predator. And that’s when I started to notice a pattern.Īll the picture books were heavily dominated by male characters. So I scoured charity shops and school fairs and built up a large collection of picture books I genuinely wanted to read to her – a mix of current bestsellers and classics. While my husband didn’t mind reading Flora the same books each night, I found it too monotonous. So how do you raise a bookworm in 2020? Personally, I started by prioritising my own pleasure. When Flora writes her own stories, her robots, dinosaurs and wolves are always female The majority of children of all ages now prefer screens to books, another recent survey found. Only a quarter read daily, compared with 43% in 2015. Research by the National Literacy Trust in today’s Observer reveals that just over half (53%) of children read for pleasure in 2019, down from 59% in 2016. “I didn’t think children read like that any more.”īookworms like Flora, it seems, are dying out. “It’s just not something you see nowadays,” she said, beaming with happiness. Last summer, an elderly lady approached us in a park because she’d noticed Flora sitting reading for nearly half an hour. And when Flora reads in public, it often attracts attention. By 1999, when I was in my late teens, this figure had risen to 79%.īut things are different now. A survey of children’s reading habits from 1977 shows 75% of 10- to 14-year-olds in the UK were reading for pleasure. It was effortless and magical, and I think not that unusual at the time. Like Flora, I could open a book and shut out everything that was happening around me. I, too, had a torch and knew how to use it – and I remember having a few lamp-post encounters of my own. Flora’s behaviour seems entirely normal to me – perhaps because I was a bookworm myself, as a child in the 1980s. “Look at her, she’s reading,” they’ll whisper to me, in a tone of wonder, as if I did not have eyes.Īt first, I found this quite strange. In small shops, she often quietly tucks herself away in a corner to read – and then, when I call her to leave the shop with me, the assistants will intervene and beg me not to disturb her further. When she reads in restaurants, for example, waiters tell me how rare it is to see a child immersed in a book, instead of glued to a phone. This year it focuses on the joy of sharing stories with others, but I feel sad about how necessary it is – and how surprised people often are to see Flora enjoying a book in public. It is World Book Day on Thursday, a day when children everywhere are encouraged to celebrate books and take pleasure in reading.
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