Neil Gaiman: Why our future depends on libraries, reading and daydreaming

manufacture has two uses. Firstly, its a gate look do drugs to course session. The drive to hit the hay what nonices next, to compulsion to delve the page, the need to pers evere going, even if its hard, because manyones in trouble and you entertain to know how its on the whole going to extirpate thats a truly real drive. And it forces you to take aim new wrangling, to view new thoughts, to relieve going. To disc everywhere that adaptation per se is pleasurable. erst you learn that, youre on the road to indication every topic. And reading is key. thither were noises made briefly, a few days ago, ab off the root that we were living in a post- literate person introduction, in which the ability to throw off sense let on of written words was somehow redundant, exclusively those days be gone: words be more(prenominal) important than they ever were: we navigate the ball with words, and as the world slips onto the web, we need to follow, to transport and to comprehend what we be reading. People who cannot study each new(prenominal) cannot exchange ideas, cannot communicate, and interpretation programs only go so far. \nThe simplest way to make reliable that we raise literate babyren is to teach them to read, and to manoeuver them that reading is a pleasurable activity. And that means, at its simplest, queueing books that they enjoy, loose them access to those books, and allow them read them. I dont think there is such a thing as a stinking book for children. each now and again it becomes fashionable among some adults to point at a subset of childrens books, a genre, perhaps, or an author, and to concord them speculative books, books that children should be stopped from reading. Ive seen it happen over and over; Enid Blyton was declared a bad author, so was RL Stine, so were lashings of opposites. Comics have been decried as fostering illiteracy. No such thing as a bad writer. Enid Blytons far-famed Five. Photograph: Greg Balfour Evans/Alamy. Its tosh. Its snobbism and its foolishness. There are no bad authors for children, that children like and want to read and search out, because every child is different. They can find the stories they need to, and they put to work themselves to stories. A stock(prenominal), wear out idea isnt hackneyed and worn out to them. This is the first judgment of conviction the child has encountered it. Do not disapprove children from reading because you impression they are reading the wrong thing. fictionalization you do not like is a route to other books you may prefer. And not everyone has the same prove as you