Newcastle University

How do you think your early experiences of books might have influenced your attitude to reading today?

I think it was a habit, so I think it was influenced that way – it was something you habitually did. I think it was something I enjoyed, something that most people did. Nowadays, you know, people say, ‘Oh, I’m not a reader’ – that wouldn’t have been said when I was growing up, everybody read books, because that was the main form of entertainment. And I hear my mother-in-law frequently say, ‘I rue the day I wasn’t a reader’, because now she’s sitting in an armchair, and she doesn’t read, and she hasn’t got that habit, which she could, she’s bored. Whereas I can’t imagine being in that position. And my mum read until her nineties. She thought it was quite funny, because she began to lose her memory as time went on, and she thought it was good because you’d read something in the morning, and you wouldn’t remember it by the afternoon, so you could read it again! [laughs] […] So I think habit forming, I think enjoyment. I see a book as something to enjoy, I don’t see it as a trial or a challenge. Even books that I start and think, ‘I’m not really all that keen on this,’ I inevitably finish them before I discard them. So I think habit forming is the biggest thing, and just pleasure, I just enjoy them. It’s hard to say that you learn a lot through them – that’s not the reason I read them, but I think subconsciously you do learn a lot through reading.