Celebrating readers

For a long time now naysayers from around the world – but mostly from the West – have said that young people don’t read anymore and the written word is dying because of TV, the internet and the cryptic SMS (short message service) culture.

Everywhere I looked I saw signs of the opposite and I’ve often wondered if someone from the TV and internet industry actually started the rumour of the demise of books and newspapers to fuel their own businesses.

Well, I’m not worrying about that anymore because I’ve found out that the love of books by young people never really went away.

In fact the National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER) in the UK has found that TV has decreased in popularity as a pastime for the first time in years among nine to 11-year-olds.

The findings by Marian Sainsbury and Rebecca Clarkson also show that books and paper-based reading at home and at school continue to play a central part in children’s lives. (Full report: www.nfer.ac.uk).

Earlier polls of 11 to 16-year-olds by publishers A&C Black also found that parents perceive that their children don’t read simply because the young ones prefer to read the books their parents hate. While parents would like their offspring to read the classics they enjoyed as kids, the younger generation has its own idea of what construes a classic and may include Vatsayana’s Kama Sutra and Bridget Jones’s Diary.

A third study by Tesco found out that the perception that children are glued to a computer screen is a myth or an exaggeration and, further, they read more than their parents ever read at their age.

This in turn has prompted young people to recommend books to their parents – the most famous example is Harry Potter by J.K. Rowling which continues to remain on the top ten lists of books recommended by children to parents.

Speaking of the author, her A5 size, 800-word handwritten prequel to the Harry Potter books was auctioned off for charity on Tuesday for £25,000 (Dh180,000).

The bidder was an adult.

Nirmala Janssen
editor@alnisrmedia.com

Xpress4me.com/letters