Happy Birthday to The Reading Agency

The excellent organisation The Reading Agency  is 10 years old. The Reading Agency is a wonderful charity whose aim is to inspire more people to read more. They work particularly closely with libraries which give equal access to books and reading. They celebrated their 10th birthday at the British Library last week and Jeanette Winterson gave the inaugural Reading Agency Lecture. It was characteristically trenchant, wise and rousing--she quoted Andrew Carnegie "who believed in books and the chances they offered" and who "wanted libraries to be the universities anyone could attend and no-one would ever have to leave." She also said:  "Books as objects matter. Ebooks are not an improvement; they are an addition" and that "for kids in particular ebooks aren't the answer....Early reading is physicality--the taste, smell, weight of books." We should all pay attention to this, and then go back to Give a Book.

Jeanette Winterson on Reading

In her wonderful memoir Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?  Jeanette Winterson writes: “Books, for me, are a home. Books don’t make a home—they are one, in the sense that just as you do with a door, you open a book, and you go inside. Inside there is a different kind of time and a different kind of space.
There is warmth there too—a hearth. I sit down with a book and I am warm. I know that from the chilly nights on the doorstep.”
Also, check out her journalism—she wrote movingly about our friend The Reader Org in The Times .
Now go back to Give a Book.