Letting in the Light

“Before reading, the world is experienced; after, it becomes interpretable as well.” ~ JC Monnerville

I’ve spent the last four years writing about two great readers, James and Dorcas Lackington. James wrote in his first memoir that his wife was “ immoderately fond of books.” In fact, it was the thought to reading to and being read to by a fellow booklover that drew him to her. But it was only when he began to read for pleasure rather than for instruction that, “My mind began to expand, intellectual light and pleasure broke in and dispelled the gloom.”

To celebrate the National Year of Reading, I have harvested a collection of quotes about the positive impact that reading has had on people’s lives – my own included.

On Being Read to as a Child

I’m sad to say that I have no memories of being read, but I have very few memories of early childhood full-stop. As one of five children, and with my father often working nights, we had very little one-to-one time. I was rather envious when I read that Sarah Hall’s father drove over a high upland road from work to get back in time for bedtime stories.  But I grew up in a household with books in it. My father in particular was a great reader. I wonder how many police officers leave for the nightshift with a quote from The Highwayman: “I’ll be back with the yellow gold before the morning sun.”

Here are some memories shared by others:

“The summer I was four, my mum read EB White’s Charlotte’s Web to me and my older sister. I don’t recall much of the story, only that my mum was unable to go on reading through her tears.” ~ Florence Knapp 

“Sitting on the sofa with my mum reading Mabel the Whale by Patricia King, with beautiful colour illustrations by Katherine Evans.” ~ Andrew Miller

“My parents both read to me frequently growing up, particularly at bedtime. Dad incorporated his own sound effects—in which I could choose to participate—into the Disney Little Golden Book edition of The Three Little Pigs.” ~ Abby Hargreaves  

Me, age 5, just after recovering from pneumonia

“My foster father read the Milwaukee Journal out loud to me every day. I remember reading the words myself at about 4. I learned history, politics, health. I keenly remember reading about Pattie Hearst at 6.” ~ Kris A. Newman (@KrisANewman)

“Every morning a plate of buttered toast and Rose’s lime marmalade was taken up to Grannie, along with a copy of the Daily Express and I would snuggle in beside her, cadging bits of toast while she read to me the adventures of Rupert Bear.” ~ Judith Barrie

“My mother reading Three Billy Goats Gruff and doing the voices! It still brings a smile to my face over forty years later!” ~ Genea Monroe

“He (her father) used to sit at the end of our beds every night and read us these incredibly exciting stories, some of them quite frightening, pillows over our head, but he just gave us this incredible interest.” ~ Queen Camilla

“Sitting on the verandah steps listening to Dad reading The Hobbit to my older sister; I was too young to follow the story (3 or 4 years old), but sitting in the sun and listening to the words was pleasure enough in itself.” ~ Helen

“Myself as a young child I did not like to read. I so enjoyed it when someone else read to me. I could get into the story without stumbling over the words.” ~ W.Goepner 

“I remember my mom reading Goodnight, Moon and Mother Goose Nursery Rhymes to me and then me and my sister together after she was born. My mom said that I would memorise the lines in books and she swore I was reading the words but I know I wasn’t “reading” that early because I remember the first time I actually read a book page by page.” ~ Heather

“My father read to me at bedtime. The book I remember as being The One, was a ‘Boy’s Own’ version of The Last Of The Mohicans. That was it, I had to get me some of THAT! It’s still my favourite too. It’s that I give credit to for starting me off.” ~ Speesh Reads

“As I sit on a colourful carpet listening to my pre-kindergarten teacher, who just happened to be a friend of the family, reading The Berenstain Bears was one of my first memories of learning to read. She would slowly read word-for-word and demonstration what she was reading, and of course show each picture she came across.” ~ Anon. 

“I was always more of a TV junkie until 5th grade when my teacher would read a chapter aloud each day after lunch. If I’m not mistaken she started with The Mouse and the Motorcycle, Charlotte’s Web, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Prince Caspian, Voyage of the Dawn Treader.” ~ Contrarian 1970

Early Reading Memories

I remember “reading” picture books, but I cannot remember that Eureka moment, when shapes became letters and letters joined together to make words and took on meaning. It’s the illustrations I recall more than the words. I think that’s where my love of art comes from. I adored Cicely Mary Barker’s glorious Flower Fairies which came in books that were the perfect size for a child’s hands, as did the Peter Rabbit books. I also loved any thing illustrated by E H Shepherd.

I probably learned to read at about the same time as my sister, who is less than a year older than me. Anything she could do, I had to keep up. I remember learning to write “upside-down” by sitting opposite her and copying what she did.

By the time I was five and went to school, I was already reading and writing. Not long afterwards, I fell ill with pneumonia and during the six weeks that I was off school I could do nothing but read. I had my own bookshelf above my bed. Later I had a small bookcase. I still have some books from childhood. The Magic Pudding and Anne of Green Gables. The pages are a nicotine yellow and sellotaped to the spine is a coloured strip of paper, suggesting that I fancied myself a librarian.

“In a lot of ways, it’s as if my childhood began when I learned to read.” ~ Katie Kitamura 

“I remember the first word I ever read on my own. It was WATER, printed on a drain in a Baltimore street. I was two years old, walking with my granddad.” ~ Jayson Elliott

“I first started to read on my own at about 2 or 3. I loved the book Go Dog Go and had it read so many times to me that I just kept reciting it. Then I realized the letters corresponded to words – and I found the same letters and words in other books we had.” ~ Deena Larson 

“Apparently I taught myself to read when I was three via the labels on the Beatles 45s.” ~ Ali Smith

“Oh lord, I hated it. I agonised over Green Eggs and Ham. I was so proud when I could finally get through it but I can vividly remember wanting to chuck that book across the room.” ~ Ragged Claws

“I distinctly remember reading Little Bear and feeling my brain soar for the first time. It was a magic trick that I was doing!” ~ Kris A. Newman

“I do remember that I learned to read like flipping a switch, one moment I couldn’t the next moment I could. it was early in the first grade, which for me I started at age 5, and it was also with the Dick and Jane books!” ~ Weaving Knitter

“My first memory is picking up a Ladybird edition of Thumbelina at a book fair and reading the whole thing on the way home. I was four, and English isn’t my first language. My parents were very impressed.” ~ TinkerToon

“I was in my first year at school, in the Infants, in Mrs Thurston’s class. We were reading in pairs. My partner was Jill Marshall and the book we were reading was, I believe, Janet and John.” ~ Michael Szpakowski 

“I didn’t learn to read in the first years of school and became entrenched in illiteracy until my grandmother, a retired primary school teacher, intervened.” ~ Sarah Moss 

“The Cat in the Hat by Dr Seuss, particularly the little red fan the cat holds in the tip of its tail.” ~ Deborah Levy

“I remember reading Jacqueline Wilson aloud to my mum in the car. I think it was The Illustrated Mum.” ~ Saba Sams 

“I loved Stuart Little, and all his small, clever things – his tiny canoe, his tiny sailboat.” ~ Susan Choi

“When I was eight, my mother bought me Stanley Bagshaw and the Short-sighted Football Trainer by Bob Wilson.” Benjamin Wood

“When I was about 8-9, my mother had had surgery, so during this particular visit, I was going to be staying with my wonderful Aunt for several days, maybe a week. Into my hands she placed the entire series of The Black Stallion.” ~ Weaving Knitter

“I acquired from somewhere, in my more or less atheistic family, a Ladybird Book of the Lord’s Prayer, whose every page I can recover in all its lurid 1960s naturalism.” ~ Tessa Hadley 

“Like everybody else growing up in the 1970s, I had a copy of Watership Down by Richard Adams on my bedroom shelves – it was the law.” ~ Jonathan Coe 

“My father worked in NW DC and we lived in an apartment in NE. He rode the bus back and forth. Every day I would run down the hill to meet him and he would have a new book for me. Golden Books; Wonder Books. We had no car, but I had books.” ~ Wilhelmina Jenkins

“I was six, and in the lounge in my first home in Manchester. I was sitting cross-legged on the grey carpet, in 1977, when I finished reading whichever of Enid Blyton’s brilliant Secret Seven mysteries contains the mind-blowing (genuinely, for a six-year-old) twist that “Emma Lane” turns out to be a road and not a person.” ~ Sophie Hannah

“The first books I became obsessed with were Enid Blyton’s boarding school stories Malory Towers and St Clare’s. When I was eight, I’d hide them under my pillow and read by the hallway light when I was supposed to be asleep.” ~ Nussaibah Younis

“I used to read Donald Sobol’s Encyclopedia Brown stories with my mother. It’s a classic American kids’ series about a boy detective and his brilliant sidekick, Sally, who protects him as they tackle their arch enemy, Bugs Meany, a kind of high school bully version of Professor Moriarty. We’d sit in the kitchen together and try to solve the crimes.” ~ Ben Markovits

Visits to the Library

“The idea of education has been so tied to schools, universities, and professors that many assume there is no other way, but education is available to anyone within reach of a library.” ~ Louis L’Amour

Saturday afternoons were reserved for trips to Morden Library. There were far fewer books for 8 – 12 year olds, although I remember devouring Swallows and Amazons, the Narnia series The Hobbit and Watership Down. Soon I was experimenting with Alan Garner. His was a world of standing stones, ancient burial places and totems; of magic blended with the everyday, rooted deep in the English landscape. After I first climbed a mountain at the age of 18, I returned to his novels and found them far more strange and un-nerving than I did as a child, but children are far more connected to miracles and magic and don’t question them, especially if they are brought up with religion. As Mac Barnett wrote in a recent essay: “I was certain secret doors existed in real life, and spent a lot of time looking for them.”

Moving up to the Adult Fiction section of the library is surely one of the most important rites of passage in childhood. There, I succumbed to the temptations of “forbidden” books like Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Flowers in the Attic, but also raced through novels by Thomas Hardy and E M Forster.

“I was extremely shy, too shy to ask where the children’s books were located, so the first books I read were adult novels and poems. These were located in the perfect spot for the extremely bashful— near the exit and the check-out desk.” ~ Eight Memories of Reading

“Libraries are a middle finger raised firmly against the rest of the world’s glum insistence that everything should demand a price.” ~ Adrian J Walker

“When I was a child my favourite place in all the world was Kingston Library. Children’s libraries weren’t bright and colourful then, with tiny tables and chairs, squashy cushions, rugs and little reading nooks. My childhood library was simply a plain room lined with bookshelves – but it was a gateway to many new and wonderful worlds.” ~ Jaqueline Wilson 

“I spent three days a week for 10 years educating myself in the public library, and it’s better than college. People should educate themselves — you can get a complete education for no money. At the end of 10 years, I had read every book in the library, and I’d written a thousand stories.” ~ Ray Bradbury

“In a library, you could find miracles and truth and you might find something that would make you laugh so hard that you get shushed, in the friendliest way.” ~ Anne Lammot

“I find that when I come out of the library I’m in what I call the library bliss of being totally taken away from the distractions of life.” ~ Tracy Chevalier

“I was made for the library, not the classroom. The classroom was a jail of other people’s interests. The library was open, unending, free.” ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

Books Linked to Specific Memories

I fell out of love with reading after the kind of enforced reading that comes with studying books for exams. I have a very clear memory of reading A Prayer for Owen Meaney, at the age of 21 and weeping at the end. It brought me back to reading. I devoured Birdy by William Wharton, Betty Blue by
Philippe Djian, Cal and Lamb by Bernard MacLaverty – very few books by women writers, I’m ashamed to say. I wasn’t aware of a bias until I began to write and was asked which women writers I enjoyed.

The books I associate with my mid-twenties are Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter Thompson and The Tales of the City series by Armistead Maupin.

“I had a children’s encyclopedia on the shelf above my bed – orange and brown, the cover old flaking plastic.” ~ Yael van der Wouden

 “I have to go back to Blume’s It’s Not the End of the World. I very distinctly remember being on my twin bed reading that book and deciding to be a writer.” ~ Lily King

“The Black Stallion. I was in elementary school and utterly obsessed with horses.” ~ MagicMurff

“The Hobbit in 5th grade. Drawing scenes as a kid and being so enthralled with the imagery.” ~ Iheartarthurdent

“Brothers Karamazov was my first “big” book at 19. I remember staying at my first loves’ parents’ cottage, visiting for a week, a nice property on the lake. I remember distinctly laying in the hot august sun roasting on the dock and laughing out loud at Fyodor the buffoon.” ~ Stuxian Nightmare

“Reading House of Leaves alone in a house without power during a winter thunderstorm. Reading Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the time of Cholera on hot, hot hot summer days.” ~ Automator 3000

“Curled up in this huge velvety chair, listening to the Violent Femmes’ first album, and crying when Sturm died in the DragonLance books.” ~ eisforennui

“Every summer my grandparents would take all us grandkids to a cabin on the lake in northern Wisconsin. We would go fishing, boating, tubing, swimming, etc. All fun outdoor things. But, this particular summer was when The Goblet of Fire came out and all I wanted to do was read.” ~ Lost Fanatic 6 

“I remember my first trip to U.S.A. (I live in Denmark, its a long way) to visit my uncle and see some of the beautiful nature. I remember reading Harry Potter in the back of the car and looking out the window to see giant trees and mountains.” ~ Jens Jakob 

“Reading The Hobbit on the train from Hannover to Brussels and back.” ~ ReadsaLot

Rediscovering Reading

“It wasn’t until I went to prison that I had books brought back into my life and I realised how important reading was, how much I missed it. It was more than just a way of passing time. You fell in love with characters and you wanted to read the next book in the series to find out what was going to happen. ” ~ David, The Big Issue

“Most people don’t spend a lot of time thinking about poetry until their father dies, you go to a funeral, you lose a child, somebody breaks your heart & that’s when Art’s not a luxury it’s sustenance. We need it.” ~ Ethan Hawke

A Life Without Reading

“If you’ve ever read to a young child, most anything other than contemporary slop (Mrs Piggle Wiggle, E Nesbit, Narnia, even Frog and Toad) you will find they encounter words and ideas on nearly every page that they are unfamiliar with. They will deduce some of it, they will ask you to explain much too, and in this way they acquire a deep and rich vocabulary and language that they would not come by through simple verbal communication. But we can watch the opposite happen in real time too; children who are never read to, adults who also do not read, are lacking this depth, not just of language, but of thought. It is a death, a death of something vital that I think links to our souls, to the very essence of what makes us human.” ~ Rebecca @Avonleebythesea on Twitter

“We know from our work at Read Easy that millions of people in the UK struggle to read and write,” says Read Easy CEO Carla Priddon. “This can be due to negative experiences of education, learning difficulties and differences – such as dyslexia, ADHD, vision and hearing problems – and environmental factors such as inconsistent education or limited access to books. The impact of this can be far reaching, affecting people’s financial and career prospects, mental and physical health, self-esteem and relationships.”

“Application forms, letters from the hospital, everyday post, applying for a passport… this was when you actually had to write a letter. My sister used to do my letters for me.” ~ Paula

“When someone asked me I’d just started shaking, started panicking, wee panic attacks.” ~ Irene McGregor

Learning to Read as an Adult

“People asked me, ‘Can you spell your grandchildrens’ names?’ Things like that. I’ve got them all tatooed on my arm. All of a sudden the pottery starting bringing forms. I used to rip them up, throw them away and say, ‘I’m here for work’.  Don’t mess about with your bits of paper!” You do anything to get out of it.

Then I started going to union meetings and they said, ‘Right. We’ve picked 19 of you to go out in the pottery industry and find people that have problems reading.’ And the bloke next to me, he says, ‘Ah, hey up, what a waste of money.’ I said, ‘Oi, I’m one of them people.’ And then the whole place just went quiet.

People were saying, ‘We didn’t know that at all. You look so confident.’ I said, ‘That’s the way I’ve hid it.'” ~ Tommy Dawkins

“I taught myself to read by studying newspapers and copying the words. From that moment, I understood the pathway from slavery to freedom.” ~ Frederick Douglass

“I taught myself… letter by letter.” Jarvis Jay Masters — learned to read/write in prison – That Bird Has My Wings

“Each word was like a stone I had to lift.” ~ Jimmy Santiago Baca — taught himself to read in prison – A Place to Stand 2001

“I felt like a man who had been asleep and was suddenly awakened.” ~ Malcolm X

“I learned to read by myself… and it opened up the whole world to me.” ~ Maya Angelou

The links between poor literacy skills and offending

“Over 60 per cent of people in prison struggle with reading. Many cannot read at all.” ~ Shannon Trust, 2024.

“Prisoners have much lower levels of literacy than the general population. The most recent data published by the Ministry of Justice shows that 57% of adult prisoners taking initial assessments had literacy levels below those expected of an 11-year-old.”

“At a cost to the taxpayer of around £45,000 each year, it is astonishing that prisoners can serve their sentence without being taught to read or to improve their reading skills. Yet this is the depressing finding of this joint thematic report between HMIP and Ofsted. We know that many prisoners have had a disrupted schooling and that high numbers cannot read at all or are functionally illiterate, so it is very disappointing that this essential skill is given such a low profile in prisons.” ~ Charlie Taylor, Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector, HMIP

“Reading is also closely linked to confidence and self-worth. When learners struggle to read, they are more likely to disengage from education altogether. Conversely, improving reading ability supports wider learning, communication skills and long-term employability, all of which are key to reducing reoffending.” ~Novus

General quotes about Reading

“Once you learn to read, you will be forever free.” ~ Frederick Douglass

“Reading was my education when no one else was educating me.” ~ Tara Westover

“Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.” ~ Richard Steele

“Reading has always been my home, my sustenance, my great invincible companion.” Anne Quidlen 

“Reading brings us unknown friends.” ~ Honoré de Balzac

“I read to know I was not alone.” ~ C S Lewis, Surprised by Joy

“He who does not read, at 70 will have lived only one life. He who reads will have lived 5,000 years.” ~ Umberto Eco

“Reading gave me a way to see a world beyond my front porch.” ~ Oprah Winfrey

“To learn to read is to light a fire; every syllable that is spelled out is a spark.” ~ Victor Hugo

“Reading maketh a full man.” ~ Francis Bacon

“A truly great book should be read in youth, again in maturity and once more in old age, as a fine building should be seen by morning light, at noon and by moonlight.” ~ Robertson Davies