A good book changes everything
Reading for pleasure is a necessary thing
So begins Just William, the first of Richmal Crompton’s comic tales of a mischievous schoolboy.
In this case, William buys some sweets, goes to the pictures, and decides to re-enact the melodramas he’s seen on the way home. It all goes downhill from there.
I’m not sure if William’s escapades inspired all of my misadventures with the Offaly Street gang, but I read enough of Crompton’s stories that they must have fuelled a few.
There is something particularly special about childhood reading. Stories play differently to those for whom the words are new, the adventures are new, in fact the whole world is new. This is something recognised by the brilliant children’s writer, Katherine Rundell.
Children’s books are written “for those to whom the world is new and strange,” she has said. To young children, the world might be exciting but it is often bewildering too, and people who write for children “have the chance to point them towards beauty that they do not yet know exists: towards versions of joy that they have not yet imagined possible”.
Sometimes that joy can take a banal form, and that’s good too. Last Saturday my two youngest grandchildren rushed into the house in great excitement.
They had just been to the Summer Stars party at Athy library and wanted to show me the goodie bags they had been gifted on leaving.
Summer Stars is one of the many free programmes that runs in our library, part of a national reading programme for children that takes place all summer long.
When they sign up, children receive a gift bag with pens, pencils, and activity books where they can record their reading and their visits to the library.
At the end they receive a certificate, enjoy a party, and – it looks like – depart with a good handful of jellies.
What a wonderful initiative to encourage children at the beginning of their reading adventure.
Another project, which I only became aware of last week on the passing of Dolly Parton, was her Imagination Library which operates across many countries, including Ireland.
In participating communities in Cork and Dublin, children receive a book in the post every month from birth to the age of five. The singer-songwriter, who grew up in poverty in Tennessee, started the literacy initiative in honour of her father, who was forced to finish school early and never learned to read and write.
For families struggling with the cost of living, receiving a book a month from the Imagination Library – or being able to borrow from our own fine public library – means no hard decisions between fulfilling basic needs and ensuring their children can grow up in a house full of books.
If a child is registered in the Imagination Library on birth, by the age of five they will have a library of 60 books, each chosen for a particular stage of development.
What a wealth for a child ready to start school.
The core funding for the programme comes from local partners – local authorities, businesses or organisations – while the Imagination Library handles the book selection, purchasing and mailouts.
It is a project that is flourishing in Cork and Dublin; about half a million books have been gifted to Irish children since the Imagination Library was extended to Ireland in 2019. Could we find a way to bring it to the children of Athy?
The estimated cost of books and postage per child is €2.51. With a population of about 1,500 eligible children in Athy – someone more adept at using the CSO website might arrive at a more accurate figure – it does not seem an insurmountable cost.
The amount to be raised could be even less if a smaller population is targeted, as is done in the cities.
In the meantime, we have our own homegrown Imagination Library. For the past two years, the local Lions Bookshop has invited children to visit and choose a free book for themselves every month.
Just call into the shop on Duke Street, which is open five days a week, and which is stacked to the ceiling with a great array of titles for adults and children.
If the grown-ups are lucky they might even come away with a bargain too.
I’ll finish by returning to the great Katherine Rundell, who was writing recently in an English daily on the impact of AI and technology on children.
Considering how AI has already infiltrated so much of young people’s lives, she writes, AI ‘has thrown stark and urgent light on how fundamental books and reading are to our shared understanding of who we are’.
Studies show that children who use AI-assisted learning give up easier.
It offloads thinking, reduces stamina, takes the sweat and grit out of learning and discovering. Knowledge and imagination are the first site of resistance to AI slop, she writes.
Reading for pleasure, to develop imagination, to struggle to understand, for intellectual freedom, is a necessary thing.
And that imaginative journey begins with the simplest piece of technology: a good storybook.
As Mark Twain once remarked: ‘The person who doesn’t read good books has no advantage over the person who can’t read them’.
