Mark Brown
Author says physical books are here to stay during keynote speech on what he sees as future of books, reading and libraries
Author says physical books are here to stay during keynote speech on what he sees as future of books, reading and libraries
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| Neil Gaiman believes well-meaning adults can destroy a child's love of
reading by giving them 'worthy-but-dull books'. Photograph: Danny
Lawson/PA
Children should be allowed to read whatever they enjoy, the author Neil Gaiman has said as he warned that well-meaning adults could destroy a child's love of reading for ever.
Gaiman was delivering a lecture on Monday night about the future of books, reading and libraries to an audience of arts and literary figures. In a wide-ranging speech he said the rise of ebooks did not mean the end for physical books and made an impassioned plea to stop library closures.
Gaiman,
who has written books for children and adults, warned of the dangers of
trying to dictate what children read at the second annual Reading Agency lecture, inaugurated last year by Jeanette Winterson.
He
said: "I don't think there is such a thing as a bad book for children."
Every now and again there was a fashion for saying that Enid Blyton or
RL Stine was a bad author or that comics fostered illiteracy. "It's
tosh. It's snobbery and it's foolishness."
He added: "Well-meaning
adults can easily destroy a child's love of reading. Stop them reading
what they enjoy or give them worthy-but-dull books that you like – the
21st-century equivalents of Victorian 'improving' literature – you'll
wind up with a generation convinced that reading is uncool and, worse,
unpleasant."
Gaiman revealed that he too had been guilty, once
telling his 11-year-old daughter that if she loved Stine's horror books,
she would absolutely adore Stephen King's Carrie: "Holly read nothing
but safe stories of settlers on prairies for the rest of her teenage
years and still glares at me when Stephen King's name is mentioned."
Gaiman
said physical books were here to stay. He recalled a conversation with
Douglas Adams more than 20 years ago in which Adams said a real book was
like a shark. "Sharks are old, there were sharks in the ocean before
the dinosaurs and the reason there are still sharks around is that
sharks are better at being sharks than anything else is. Physical books
are tough, hard to destroy, bath-resistant, solar operated, feel good in
your hand – they are good at being books and there will always be a
place for them.
Earlier Gaiman said most of the publishing
industry was trying to figure out what is going to happen in five or 10
years. "None of them know. All of the rules have changed … they are just
making it up as they go along."
Gaiman said reading fiction was
one of the most important things people can do and he was passionate in
his defence of libraries, the closure of which was stealing from the
future, he said. "It is the equivalent of stopping vaccination
programmes. We know what the results are. In order to remain a global
power, in order to have a citizenry that is fulfilled and fulfilling
their responsibilities and obligations, we need to have literate kids."
Gaiman
now lives near Minneapolis in the US and said the same debates were
taking place there, although places in the US "were closed with less
pride" than they are in the UK.
The Reading Agency's director
,Miranda McKearney, said the lecture was part of what is "an urgent
debate about how to build a nation of readers and library users" and
cited OECD figures that showed Britons aged 16 to 24 ranked 22nd of 24
countries in terms of literary skills
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