Charlotte Higgins makes a powerful point (The National Year of Reading celebrates the ‘joy’ of books. But let’s not forget they can also be deeply troubling, too, 28 February). As she argues, reading can do much more than bring pleasure. It can help us share sorrow, endure pain, satisfy (at least temporarily) curiosity, prompt inventiveness, escape fear, enlarge our worlds, understand ourselves and others, and share in others’ pain and pleasure. It can also help us control ourselves. It can make us less self-centred. And it can certainly enlarge our vocabulary.
But first, there must be delight. Pleasure is nearly always the way in: tales that entrance you, through the same words on each rereading. Phrases that echo in your mind, such as: “Rolled their terrible eyes” (Maurice Sendak); “We’re going on a bear hunt” (Michael Rosen); and “Green eggs and ham” (Dr Seuss). Many of these crucial lessons come from early experiences of being read aloud to as a child. This instils the idea that reading opens up a box of delights.
You don’t have to wait until children have achieved a set level in their own reading competence. Once they have experienced this deep pleasure, we can expand their reading diet to include tales of sorrow, fear and longing, as well as triumph and that amorphous category: entertainment. And then, of course, there’s reading to find out – what we’re all made of, how many polar bears are left, where your grandparents came from. Reading can enable us to become less isolated, more understanding of others’ concerns, more human. Don’t decry reading for pleasure, just ensure that it doesn’t stop there.
Henrietta Dombey
Professor emerita in primary literacy, University of Brighton
• How heartily I agree with Charlotte Higgins’s article with regard to the UK’s National Year of Reading and the government’s push towards “reading for pleasure”. John Dryden maintained that the chief aim of poetry is to delight. However, I have long held the view that the purpose of art in its many forms – literature, poetry, theatre, dance, music, painting, sculpture, cinema – is to console, persuade, encourage, confront, provoke, amaze, challenge, soothe and amuse. Art is a profoundly versatile and deeply political form of communication.
Sandra Dudley
Halesowen, West Midlands
• Whether it be in the creation of the arts, or just the pure enjoyment of them, joy and pain are indeed intrinsically mixed. The cathartic music of Mahler comes to mind. So how do we sell reading to young readers? The “joy and pain of reading” doesn’t really cut the mustard.
While there is a surfeit of sweet, over-protective children’s stories coming on to the market nowadays, we only have to look at the children’s classics to see where true art lies. After all, our hero Max in Where the Wild Things Are was sent to bed without any supper, before his wondrous adventures occurred; Heidi was an orphan; and Wilbur, the much-beloved pig in Charlotte’s Web was in grave danger of being turned into sausages. Keep reading such stories to young children, and they will soon cotton on to the fact that reading for themselves will bring so much more than mere entertainment.
Joan Lewis
Saint-Étienne-de-Gourgas, France
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