Blog by Joanna Nadin
The evidence for why books matter is overwhelming.
Firstly, reading helps kids do well at school. Several studies have found that children who read for pleasure – so not just school books but any books – do better in English AND maths, better than those who rarely read.
We also know from research that reading is way more important for your life chances than how well-educated your parents are. Which is great. But reading shouldn’t be just about scoring points. It isn’t about league tables. It’s about something more fundamental, more important, than that.
What I find really exciting is a study that looked at the brains of people who read fiction compared to those who didn’t read. The brains of the readers showed more activity in certain areas. Specifically, researchers found heightened connectivity in the left temporal cortex, part of the brain typically associated with understanding language. The researchers also found increased connectivity in the central sulcus of the brain, the primary sensory region, which helps the brain visualize movement.
When you watch someone else score a goal, your brain reacts as if it’s you doing it. You can almost feel yourself in the action. But you don’t actually need to see it happen. The same bit of your brain lights up if you just read about it. A similar process happens when you envision yourself as a character in a book: You take on the emotions they are feeling.
Books teach us about other people. Specifically, they teach us to be kind. When we read about people different to us, we understand them more. Because books develop empathy – the ability to detect and understand other people’s emotions.
Philip Davies, a professor of psychological sciences at Liverpool University, says the thing about books is that they give you a view of an inner world that’s not on show. Often what you learn from novels is to be a bit baffled … a novel tells you not to judge.
So books teach us about other people. But they teach us about ourselves too.
We know from Bettelheim’s “Uses of Enchantment” that even the simplest fairy tales teach us – albeit entirely subliminally – about fear, courage, deceit. They let us learn about forgiveness. They help us negotiate new situations. They encourage us to go out and seek our fortune.
They help us work out our place in the world, and work out the kind of world we want a place in. Whether that’s modern-day Manhattan or Medieval England or Middle Earth.
Yes – even Lord of the Rings has something important to teach us.
To quote GK Chesterton: “Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us dragons can be beaten.”
Books tell us we can be dragon slayers. Or giant killers. Or just brave enough to find our way home through the woods.
What a privilege it is to be someone – like you and me – who gets to teach kids these things. That helps them negotiate the world – whether that’s metaphorical dragons or their parents.
So as writers we think about ways to make the world make sense. We think about ways to show other lives and ways of being.
Books are magic in that way. They help us work out who we are. And, more importantly, who we want to be.
A writer called Francis Spufford sums this up in a book called “The Child That Books Built”.
“Be a roman soldier, said a book by Rosemary Sutcliffe. Be an urchin in London, said a Leon Garfield… Be where you can hear cats talking… Be where magic works easily. Be where magic works frighteningly. Be where you can work magic, but have to conceal being invisible or being able to fly from the eyes of the grown-ups… Be an Egyptian child beside the Nile, be a rabbit on Watership Down. Be a King. Be a slave. Be Biggles.”
Reading helps us try out new lives for size. It helps us try out being better people.
What I love is that Francis isn’t talking about GCSE set texts. He’s talking about the kind of books kids really want to read. To escape into.
I’m willing to bet good money that there isn’t a single one of us in this room who hasn’t wanted to be someone in a book. I certainly did. And that daydreaming paid off. Because books have made me who I am.
I never set out to be a writer. Not to say I wasn’t bookish. That’s’ pretty much all I was as a young child. My idea of “playing outside” was taking a copy of Malory Towers into the garden. It still is. I really don’t do “The Great Outdoors” unless it involves sitting down and reading. And when I wasn’t reading, I was playing put the stories from the books, or making up new ones for myself, in character. Didn’t cross my mind to write them down. I thought pointless waste of time. Didn’t plan on doing something as tedious as that when I grew up. I was going to be a pirate, or a princess, or please God, George from the Famous Five.
Started out with the obvious one: Cinderella. I was obsessed with the Ladybird version of this story – namely because the dresses were so staggeringly meringue-like. I could easily imagine myself as poor Cinderella in her rags, as my own mother’s idea of a new outfit was going to Oxfam and finding something that fit, and that could be passed on to my brother at some stage.
I moved on from Cinderella to Heidi. I read Johanna Spyri’s book. Then, incredibly, arrived the appallingly-dubbed TV series of the same name and my next obsession was born. I wanted to be a goat girl. Preferable an orphaned goat girl. I was, unsurprisingly, given what I have told you about my mother’s wardrobe dictats, very keen on being an orphan and have also at various stages wanted to be Annie and Oliver Twist. Though now, having had my own daughter. I have realised that you can be the best mother in the world – which obviously I am – and they will still spend hours pretending they are impoverished orphans locked up by an evil witch.
I moved on to other obsessions:
Velvet Brown from National Velvet
Baby in Dirty Dancing
Andy in Pretty in Pink
Misunderstood girls. Preferably from the wrong side of the tracks.
I just wanted to be somebody that things happened to. Not because I was unhappy. Far from it. But because the books and films that I devoured were peopled with incredible girls. Orphans, heiresses, that kind of thing. Not lower middle-class school swots.
I carried on doing this into my late teens and twenties. I did drama at university, despite having appallingly low self-esteem. I hated being looked at. Then I went into TV, then radio. Because I believed, and I think a lot of people believe, these kind of jobs will make them ‘somebody’. But the reality is, it’s just not like that.
I wasn’t posted to Kosovo or Iraq, I wasn’t even ON TV. I was making tea for the people who were. I was also, at the end of day, still a bit of a geek. And sadly, a lot of TV is no place for a geek.
So I ended up in politics. First at the Labour Party, then as a Special Adviser to the Prime Minister. And I think that’s when it kind of clicked. Here I was, at 10 Downing Street. I was doing something important. Working for someone I admired. Changing the world. Or so I thought. It kind of doesn’t get better. And it’s not that I didn’t love the job. I did. It was an enormous privilege. But I wasn’t ‘somebody’. I wasn’t changing the world. I was just writing the script. Writing the lines for the real stars.
And I suddenly realised that I had wasted years of acting out dialogue in my head, making up adventures for myself. That they just weren’t going to happen to me. But I could make stuff happen to other people. And so, within a month of starting at No 10, when parliament went in recess for three months, I wrote my first book.
Since then I’ve written a hundred – started the hundredth last month. Write a lot. Partly because it pays. Mainly because it means I get to be these other people, live other adventures, play dress-up all day. I haven’t found myself – I’ve found my selves.
And all because I read for pleasure.
Joanna Nadin