Frequently Asked Questions

The million dollar question, and one I get asked often! It can feel like a nebulous task, but there are some practical things you can do that will push children towards a love of books:

Leave books around – covers up! Untidiness is key! If I have books I want my kids to read but know that if I hand them to them they might just put them to one side and forget about them, or, worse, feel pressured to read them and so put off, then I leave them lying around the house to be ‘stumbled across’ in a moment of boredom! It’s a lovely moment when you notice the house has gone quiet, glance up, and see a child reading the book you knew they would love, but doing it completely of their own volition!

Create a culture of books as treats. Give reading as a reward, not something to be rewarded! Our children, when they each reached a certain age, were allowed 15 minutes extra time before lights out so they could read, and they loved this! It made it feel like a rite of passage. I gave them holiday books for long journeys in the car, and they now anticipate these eagerly – what started out as a means to a quiet journey when they were young has now become a family tradition! Give books as gifts at Christmas and celebrate Julabokaflod, an Icelandic book reading festival involving food and family reading time. We always include a book in birthday presents (we follow the mantra, ‘Something you want, something you need, something to wear, something to read’, which means every birthday means at least one new book!)

Spend as much time as you can reading to them – whether this is ten minutes at bedtime, or a marathon session accompanied by a huge pile of books and a blanket on the sofa on a rainy day, everything counts! If your children lose interest quickly or struggle to stay still, then try snacks at reading time, or something to keep their hands busy – lego, craft, sewing, stickerbooks, anything they can do while they listen.

Allow for screen free spaces in your house. Kids will choose a screen over a book nine times out of ten when given the option, so it’s important to create areas where reading (or baking, making music, writing, art the list goes on……) is the only choice. Our kids didn’t have ipads, and we have a screen free rule upstairs, so bedrooms are a bookish zone, not somewhere they can use a phone. This means the time they have to fill with reading is massively increased!

Lastly, model reading for pleasure yourself if you possibly can! Our kids watch us and copy us so much more than we realise – even our teens! If our children see us reading because we love books, even though we don’t have to, it creates a bookwormish culture in our homes.

All children will read a mix of things – my kids certainly have read their share of mediocre books as well as great ones! For lots of children, reading anything is a win – and so comics, graphic novels, and audio books are all fair game. But I do try and make sure my children some really good reading in their diet – and the hours of hunting for those better-than-average books are how this website has come about! I want them to read books that fire their imaginations, stoke a love of language, feed their souls, and leave them with hope. I want them to walk a mile in someone else’s shoes, to travel to other times and places, to learn some of the hard lessons in life through someone else’s mistakes, and to have heroes who are worth following ….and I want them to be able to recognise a good sentence when they see one!

I love this quote by Katherine Paterson, author of ‘The Bridge to Terebithia’: “It is not enough to simply teach children to read; we have to give them something worth reading. Something that will stretch their imaginations - something that will help them make sense of their own lives and encourage them to reach out toward people whose lives are quite different from their own.”

All of the above applies to teens too. But I have found it harder to find excellent books for my children as they have got older. Books aimed at teens are often violent and feature unhealthy relationships, and also often are just lacking in hope. In a world where it is easy for children to feel hopeless, the best books should leave them with hope. This doesn’t mean they should gloss over difficulty and darkness, but they should shine light into it and leave children knowing there is always the possibility for good to win out. Children need to know this – and teenagers need to know this too. The best YA fiction should not just reflect a teenager’s world back at them in bleakness and cynicism, but show them broader horizons and leave them with a picture of a world in which they, themselves, can be a force for good.