Reading For Pleasure
Why the Novel is Still a Force to be Reckoned With
The market for books in the UK continues to grow, suggesting that more people may be reading for pleasure than ever before.
Read any good books lately? Chances are, you have. Yet, if the press are to be believed, the UK is increasingly a nation of illiterates, bringing up a generation of children addicted to computers and PlayStations. Reading has become irrelevant and unfashionable. Celebrities proudly flaunt their unfamiliarity with books, with Victoria Beckham recently declaring to a journalist that “I haven’t read a book in my life.” A grim picture indeed.
Success of Harry Potter
But is it the whole truth? Mrs. Beckham was almost universally ridiculed for her claim that she doesn’t read, and many would argue that, far from being an outdated concept, the novel is actually undergoing a period of immense regeneration. The most obvious example of this is the success of Harry Potter: Bloomsbury estimates that 3 million copies of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows were sold in the first 24 hours alone, with thousands of people queuing through the night just to be among the first to read it.
Richard and Judy's Book Club
Nor is this an isolated example. Writers such as Jacqueline Wilson have proved that children do like reading, and that being a part of the computer generation does not necessarily rule out a love of books. And what about the adults? Are we content to squabble over the new Harry Potter with our offspring? The formidable success of Richard and Judy’s Book Club would suggest otherwise.
Since its launch in 2004, the books recommended have sold by the bucket load: one of their first choices, Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones, has now topped sales of 1 million. It really seems that Richard and Judy’s Book Club has caught our imaginations, encouraging viewers to set up or join their own reading groups – chances are you are either a member of one of the UK’s estimated 15,000 book groups, or know someone who is.
Literary Festivals and Supermarket Shopping
This new-found enthusiasm for reading is also reflected in the increasing popularity of the literary festival: the long-established venues such as Hay-on-Wye and Cheltenham have now been joined by so many others that it may soon be easier to name a town or city without a literary festival than one with.
All this is helped by the fact that books have never been more affordable. Whether or not you approve of books being sold at heavy discounts by large retailers, the fact that you can pop a paperback into your shopping trolley for under four pounds while doing your supermarket run means that reading is no longer the elitist pastime it used to be. With adult literacy improving steadily, reading is becoming more and more accessible all the time, particularly if you take into account the vast amounts of material now available online.
More Time Spent Reading
The official statistics on our national reading habits are unavoidably several years old, but the overall trend does appear to be on the up. The University of Manchester found that in the year 2000 Britons spent an average of seven minutes per day reading a book, compared to just three minutes in 1975. It is easy to mock the idea of reading for just seven minutes – most of us have spent longer searching for clean clothes in the morning – but this figure has more than doubled in just 25 years. Add to this the huge number of people who don’t read books but enjoy newspapers and magazines, and the picture starts to look much rosier.
So the message is clear: don’t believe all that you read. But do read.
Learn more about great UK fiction:
Booker Prize Winner Anne Enright
Ian Rankin's final Rebus novel, Exit Music
