Malala Yousafzai
Activist
I have loved going to the theatre ever since I saw my first musical (Matilda in London, when I was 15 years old) – and I love reading about it, too. In Enter Ghost by Isabella Hammad, a British-Palestinian actor travels to the West Bank to see family and finds herself pulled into a local production of Hamlet. I was moved by the rehearsal scenes: arguments over translations, personal relationships, the question of whether a performance is even possible under Israeli occupation. To me, Hammad proved that theatre is capable of carrying weight that other art forms cannot hold.

David Miliband
CEO of the International Rescue Committee
Free: Coming of Age at the End of History, a book about growing up in Albania, the last Stalinist country in Europe, doesn’t sound like a rollicking good read, but Lea Ypi’s book, published in 2021, is at once hilarious and serious, appalling in its description of the lies and tentacles of the regime of Enver Hoxha and touching in its humanity, particular in its focus and universal in its application. I often say about refugees and their contribution to adopted homelands that those who have known the price of oppression don’t need any lessons in the value of freedom. Ypi’s personal story, from “Young Pioneer” in the Albanian Communist party to student in Italy and professor in the UK, is warming but also full of warnings. She has turned her experience into fuel for her political philosophy, and this makes Free more than a work of memory or history. It is also an engagement with the challenges of the present.

Katherine Rundell
Author
I think we’re often rightly sceptical of reviews that say a book is “laugh-out-loud funny” because, when we read them, they’re often, at best, smile-out-loud or plausibly caustic or flippant or wry. But Luke Kennard’s Black Bag made me laugh aloud dozens and dozens of times. It’s brilliant, a triumph of a book: the story of a young out-of-work actor who takes on a job working for a professor of psychology, who employs him to dress in a black bag during his lectures in order to gauge his students’ changing attitude to strangeness. It’s based on a real-life experiment from 1967. I loved its inventive originality and its ambition: it is very powerfully worth your time.

Jack Thorne
Screenwriter
I was quite a weird kid. Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising found that weirdness and twisted it. It’s a book I’m holding off sharing with my 10-year-old just yet because I want him to read it at the perfect age and I think that’s 11. It is about the battle between the Dark and the Light, weaving myth and history into a glorious concoction that uses language as a weapon. Complicated and mythic and entirely dangerous, it frequently sits still when other fantasies sprint and it’s all the better for it.

Margaret Busby
Publisher and president of English PEN
The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution by CLR James is an uplifting example of how the personal and political connect. First published in 1938, it puts on record the individual and collective resistance that led to the only successful revolt of the enslaved in history, still relevant as a defiant call to resisting oppression. James was my father’s friend since their schooldays in Trinidad, so when I realised in the 1970s that this masterpiece of historical literature was out of print in the UK, it was a privilege to be able to reissue it at Allison & Busby.

Philippa Perry
Psychotherapist
In a letter to her niece Anna, Jane Austen wrote: “Three or four families in a country village is the very thing to work on.” She said you don’t need sweeping plots, just close observation, small interactions, and the way people behave with one another day to day. And I think EF Benson may have taken this advice to heart when he wrote his Mapp and Lucia series. Read it and laugh about how absurd we all are. Nothing very much happens, which is the point (unless being washed out to sea on an upturned kitchen table is something happening). It’s all social manoeuvring, tiny slights, inflated egos and people taking themselves too seriously. Read it, and then decide which character most resembles you. I think there’s a bit of me in all of them.

Sajid Javid
Politician
I first read Freedom at Midnight by Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre when I was 14. It’s never left me. It tells the story of partition, a period that my father had already brought to life by recounting his own experience, and is written with the pace, colour and dramatic flair of a novel. I have gone back to it many times over the years, and always feel the emotional force that it brings to an important period of history. It’s one of those rare books that you keep an extra copy of to press into the hands of your children and friends.

Tony Robinson
Actor and author
I’m currently enthralled by a small but exquisite book called The Wordhord: Daily Life in Old English. It’s written by Hana Videen and the Old English she refers to isn’t the language of Shakespeare, whose syntax may be unfamiliar but whose words we can understand. This is the tongue of our ninth-century CE ancestors for whom Alfred the Great, fearing the decline of learning following the Viking raids, translated the finest Latin works of his time into the common vernacular. The words on offer are a joy. Dream-craeft means music, heafod-swima is intoxication, a wil-cuma is someone whose arrival is a pleasure. Dipping into this wordhord makes me feel happy.

Sarah Moss
Author
I find that with passing years I become more insistent on spending time with books (and people) that are kind as well as clever. Shirley Jackson is best known for very dark fiction, but her two memoirs, Life Among the Savages and Raising Demons, are wildly funny and sharp. It’s hard to write loving domestic comedy in the best of circumstances – sarcasm is so tempting – and Jackson’s circumstances were not the best: a novelist raising four children in 1950s America with a professorial husband who was insecure about her success and unprofessionally interested in the undergraduates at his women’s college. The memoirs manage to acknowledge and not minimise the unfairness and banality of her situation and at the same time insist on space for laughter and delight. I read them the first time on a train and giggled so much the people at my table wrote down the title.

Ocean Vuong
Poet and author
I was lucky enough to discover Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by James Agee and Walker Evans back in community college, early in my life and long before I wrote anything worth reading. This book is, to this day, one of the most innovative, strange and nebulous hybrids of text and images I’ve ever encountered. Written during the Great Depression but published in obscurity during the second world war, it forges a new way to write about suffering, one where the writer is not only a subjective participant in its reality, but perhaps even culpable for the horrors it depicts. It collapses any easy, cathartic answers we might expect nonfiction to provide. But perhaps most vitally, it’s a book that gives unlimited permission to dare, venture and risk in one’s own work and thinking.

Elif Shafak
Author
“Nothing is harder to do than nothing.” This is the basic premise and the opening line of a deeply thoughtful and thought-provoking book called How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell. It is a fascinating take on how and why we need to resist the relentless demands of our hyper-information society. It reminds us that our value as human beings is not dependent on our productivity levels or amount of consumption on any given day. It recognises that solitude, compassion, friendship, introspection, contemplation – all these universal and ancient qualities – are inalienable rights. Inviting readers to become better observers, better listeners, it encourages us to slow down. To pay more attention to the seemingly small, “insignificant things”, reconnect with each other, with nature and with ourselves. In a world where there is constant clamour, too much rigidity, polarisation and tribalism, this book shows us that you can be gentle, calm, nuanced and still be political, attending to the local, to the humble, and to what makes us human.

Susie Dent
Lexicographer
I read Le Grand Meaulnes by Alain-Fournier (The Lost Estate in English) when I was a teenager, and I’m not sure anything has quite matched it since. It is a tale of first love and a young man’s obsessive search for a lost estate and the elusive girl he once encountered there. All of it is caught in that fleeting, half-lit space between childhood and adolescence, when we’re still oblivious to what growing up will cost us. Perfect for a 17-year-old with a head full of daydreams, but even now I fall under its spell the moment I pick it up.

Ruth Ozeki
Zen Buddhist priest and author
A book I can get lost in, again and again, is Borges: Collected Fictions. It contains some of my favourite short stories – The Aleph, The Library of Babel, The Garden of Forking Paths – as well as shorter works such as Borges and I, and the strange Afterword to the collection The Maker, which resist classification. Whenever I reread these pieces, I can see how deeply they’ve informed my work. I doubt Borges would recognise the influence he’s had on me. I am grateful to him, and I can only hope he would not be offended.

John Lanchester
Author
Ursula K Le Guin is an exemplary figure in demonstrating the potential of what is still too often and too easily dismissed as “genre” fiction. It’s a toss-up for me between the first Earthsea novel – the original and best book about a school for wizards – and The Left Hand of Darkness, but I’ll go with the latter because of its thematic richness. I love how Le Guin’s work functions on multiple levels: you can read the book purely as an entertainment, but it is also a serious novel about gender, sexuality and negotiating otherness. Hard to believe it came out in 1969; that’s how long it has taken us to catch up with Le Guin.

Karen Hao
Journalist
I was in a dark place after working on my book Empire of AI, and Rebecca Solnit’s short, beautiful volume Hope in the Dark gave me new life. It’s a powerful meditation on the history of resistance movements, and why it is never time to despair, no matter the obstacles that appear before us. It was the antidote I needed, and one I now carry with me wherever I go – a reminder that yesterday, today and tomorrow was, is and will be a good day to act.

Val McDermid
Author
I often recommend to people (aged from nine to 90) Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island. It’s been adapted in so many formats, there’s always an entry level point to engage readers. I first encountered it when I was nine, in the form of a Classic Comic, what we’d now call a graphic novel. I was enthralled by so many elements – the adventure of the story, the settings (on the ship and on the island), the vivid characters (who doesn’t know Long John Silver and his parrot?). I soon discovered the book and was captivated. I reread it annually and the magic still works.

Simon Jenkins
Columnist and author
The American scholar Daniel Boorstin’s The Discoverers will always be my bible. It is subtitled A History of Man’s Search to Know His World and Himself, but it is actually a lively history of geography. Ever since Ptolomy and the ancient Greeks, geography was the queen of the sciences. It suffered persecution by the medieval church as anti-biblical heresy, which led to its disregard by curriculum snobs ever since. The book sees geography as the key science for history, politics, economics and the environment. Boorstin demands that we use the evidence of the world around us rather than our prejudices and opinions as the fount of all reason.

Matt Haig
Author
Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino is a slim, easy read, but deep. The premise is simple, if strange. Kublai Khan is given by Marco Polo descriptions of cities the younger explorer has visited. These cities are imaginary and fantastical. And all are revealed to be hallucinogenic versions of Venice. This book is basically a series of meditations. It is a calming book. The pleasure of it – and it really is my most pleasurable reading experience – is the pleasure of imagination. You can pick it up at any page and find a different city, a different imagined memory, a different impossible reality. It’s the joy of reading in its purest form and works for an ADHD mind like mine. No plot to worry about, no information to retain, no real before or after. Just the joy of travelling into a fantasy Venice. A holiday for the mind.

Sarah Hall
Author
When my dad was dying I read to him from In the Orchard, the Swallows by Peter Hobbs. The story is about a young man imprisoned for love, brutalised, set free and nursed back to health by strangers. It’s a short, luminous, extraordinary novel, infused by a genuine understanding of what it means to suffer; a knowledge that life is sometimes pared to the bone, but endurance and hope still carry us. Dad and I both had Covid; the hospital managed to grant me access to be with him, but we were isolated. To have this book in my hands was like having my friend with me during the most difficult heartbreak. Although he was fading, my dad loved the story, which is truly beautiful and full of positive mortality. It is, to this day, companionable to see the title on my bookshelf.

Marcus du Sautoy
Mathematician
Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges. I’m not usually a fan of short stories but I love the way Borges can so brilliantly conjure up a whole universe in just 10 pages. He was fascinated in the emerging ideas of infinity and multidimensional space but instead of formulas he uses narrative and storytelling to explore these ideas. The Library of Babel is my favourite, about a library that contains every book it’s possible to write. The librarian realises that the library contains nothing because no one has made any choices. The creativity of the writer comes down to choosing which stories to share with readers and, for me, Borges’s choices are ones I return to again and again.

Hay festival runs until 31 May. See hayfestival.com

The children’s laureate, Frank Cottrell-Boyce, has urged the government to prioritise pleasure over learning in children’s reading.

Giving evidence to MPs on the education committee, which is investigating the decline in reading for pleasure among children, the screenwriter and novelist said conversations about children’s reading too often revert to attainment in school.

He said that the “business of learning to read” can put children off the pleasure of reading. “We can teach them all the steps,” he told MPs, “but the important thing is that they dance.”

The number of children reading for pleasure in the UK has declined sharply in recent years. According to the National Literacy Trust’s annual survey, just one in three aged eight to 18 enjoy reading in their spare time – a 36% decrease since 2005.

Cottrell-Boyce said the reasons included screens, austerity, Covid and poverty, including the kind of “furniture poverty” experienced in emergency social housing. “No child is going to have a bedtime story if they have not got a bed,” he said.

He urged the government to focus on early years and reading for pleasure at home and nursery, with support for parents and nursery workers who may lack confidence in reading aloud to their children as a result of their own negative experiences.

“The drive of government policy for children is always freeing up parents to do more work and putting more childcare in place. If that’s your driver for children, then this is literally the least you can do.”

Cottrell-Boyce, who is coming to the end of his two-year tenure as children’s laureate, said early-years workers were among the lowest paid and the youngest. “In nurseries there are people working who have only just stopped being children themselves.

“At this point in time, it means many of them have had an incredibly diminished experience of education as a whole because of the pandemic.”

He said taking action did not need to cost a lot of money – a lot of the infrastructure was already in place. He said building parental confidence was key, and stressed the joy of “shared reading” in community settings.

“I think the early years are everything,” he told MPs on Tuesday. “Early years is when the cake is baked. Everything after that is icing or ganache, maybe, and candles and helium balloons. It’s all fun but the cake is what matters.”

He said he was optimistic about the future of children’s reading. “I think we can fix it. It seems to me blindingly obvious that what we do is prioritise the pleasure before we get into learning.

“This is something we do with everything else. No parent says to a child, ‘When you’ve learned the offside rule then I will play football with you’. We always put the pleasure first. It seems simple to me that what you do is you make sure that happens as early in life as possible.”

Also giving evidence to MPs was Rebecca Sinclair, the president of the Publishers Association, who said a shift was needed to make reading feel “less worthy”.

She said when parents are reading with their children, it was often about “reading for skill” rather than pleasure, and she said there was not enough time and space in the school day to create joy around reading.

The UK is celebrating the national year of reading, a government-led initiative supported by the National Literacy Trust to combat declining reading-for-pleasure rates.

Frank Cottrell-Boyce has urged policymakers to treat children’s reading as a “right” rather than a parental duty, warning that Britain is failing to understand the emotional and social value of reading, as new research shows a sharp decline in daily shared reading at home.

Speaking at the Royal Institution in his final laureate lecture, The Kids Are Not Alright, the children’s laureate linked falling shared reading rates to poverty, housing insecurity and social media.

“Our children have been at the sharp end of two great crises: Covid, and just as damagingly, austerity,” Cottrell-Boyce said in his lecture. “We can talk all we like about [the importance of] bedtime stories … but what does that mean to a child with no bed? Or no space for a bed?”

He said that this “furniture poverty”, alongside housing insecurity, means that children are unable to build stable routines around reading. “You’re not going to Narnia because you haven’t got a wardrobe,” he said “Your clothes are stored in bin bags ready for the next move.”

New figures from BookTrust, released to coincide with the lecture, show that daily shared reading among families with children aged eight and under has fallen from 60% in 2021 to 49% in 2025. Yet the proportion of children who “like or love reading” has risen from 66% to 80% over the same period, suggesting that enthusiasm for books remains strong.

It comes as the UK celebrates the National Year of Reading, a government-led initiative supported by the National Literacy Trust to combat declining reading-for-pleasure rates. The campaign includes launching the first Children’s Booker prize, with a judging panel chaired by Cottrell-Boyce. Three children aged 8-12 will be recruited to help adjudicate. The campaign also involves distributing 72,000 books to children in need, and fostering a “national mission” to make reading a daily habit.

Alongside economic pressures, Cottrell-Boyce told the Guardian about the impact of screens and social media on children’s attention. He said concerns about “addictive” tech platforms were now unavoidable, arguing that children’s attention is being captured by systems designed to maximise engagement.

“These kids are working for big tech,” he said. “We all are. But you’re working for someone who doesn’t love you, who is not going to pay you and doesn’t care how many hours you work. It’s a shocking situation we’ve got ourselves into.”

Referring to the growing legal and political scrutiny of technology companies, he added: “These platforms should bear total responsibility. I think these trials are a bit like the big tobacco moment.”

He added that we have failed to communicate what reading offers beyond literacy outcomes. “Reading has become so bound up with attainment and literacy, that we’ve failed to get across the emotional benefits, the fact that it is fun and should be done for pleasure,” he said.

Despite the scale of the challenges, Cottrell-Boyce said he remains optimistic about children’s reading habits and the work already being done in communities. “Pessimism is a luxury that we can’t afford,” he said. “I do feel optimistic. I’ve met amazing people and seen amazing practice that costs next to nothing.”

Cottrell-Boyce has used his two-year tenure as children’s laureate to promote his Reading Rights campaign, which argues that shared reading should be embedded in early years support, from health visitors to family hubs. The new children’s laureate will be announced in July.

My earliest reading memory
I remember reading throughout my childhood, but it’s hard to identify my earliest memory of reading. In a lot of ways, it’s as if my childhood began when I learned to read. I do remember taking a copy of Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’s Dangerous Liaisons off the shelf when I was maybe 10 or 11 – far too young to be reading it. I was suitably scandalised and excited by it.

My favourite book growing up
I read a lot of Theodore Dreiser growing up, for reasons that are mysterious to me now. I don’t know how I came to him: he wasn’t assigned in school and no one in my family was reading his books. But his focus was on female characters and perhaps even then, that felt notable. I started with Sister Carrie, then read Jennie Gerhardt and An American Tragedy, but Sister Carrie was the one I returned to again and again.

The book that changed me as a teenager
The Jungle by Upton Sinclair. I was about 12 when I read it and it transformed my understanding of what a story was. That was the first time I understood the capacity of the novel not only to comment on, but to enact social change.

The writer who changed my mind
Almost every writer changes my mind – that is the point of reading.

The book that made me want to be a writer
Kenzaburō Ōe’s A Personal Matter. I was in my mid-20s and my father was dying of cancer. I understood the possibilities of writing differently after I read Ōe, the way it both sat alongside ordinary life but also offered a perch from which to understand it.

The author I came back to
Yasunari Kawabata wasn’t especially easy for me to understand when I was younger. His books are slim, and when I was young they felt tonally almost erratic, both passionate and restrained. Now, I read him and each book seems like a minor miracle.

The book I reread
Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady. It’s one of those books that contains many different meanings and that seems to shift each time you read it, which is one of the many signs of its greatness.

The book I could never read again
There’s probably no book that I wouldn’t read again. Even a book that I know I wouldn’t enjoy now would still be interesting to read, to figure out how both it and I had changed. And there is always the possibility that I would enjoy it after all. Books are always surprising you.

The author I discovered later in life
Muriel Spark was a relatively late discovery. I read The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and The Girls of Slender Means when I was in my early 20s, and maybe too young to fully appreciate their genius. I’ve been systematically reading my way through the others, from Loitering With Intent and Memento Mori to my personal favourite, The Driver’s Seat. It’s been one of the most satisfying and astonishing reading experiences of my life.

The book I am currently reading
I have been rereading Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier as well as Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair.

My comfort read
Possibly the same books as in the answer above, but also the entirety of Javier Marias’s work.

Luke Kennard, writer

This is a really good year for new fiction. I don’t think anyone writes about contemporary Englishness as astutely, mercilessly and affectionately as Claire Powell, and her latest novel, All In, puts her perfectly observed characters in the pressure cooker of an all-inclusive holiday. It’s a kind of meta-beach read, and I loved it.

A friend gave me a copy of the Argentine author César Aira’s short novel Ghosts (translated by Chris Andrews), which I devoured the other day. A family of builders are squatting in a half-built luxury apartment complex and start seeing beautiful ghosts. It’s scary and captivating and made me determined to get hold of all his books. He was one of Roberto Bolaño’s favourite writers so you can get into him now, then roll your eyes when everyone’s talking about him in two to three years.

I’m also very slowly reading Hilary Mantel’s French Revolution novel A Place of Greater Safety in parallel with my partner. I’m obsessed with Camille. Regardless of station, every man in the 18th century looked like a fat judge, but Camille looked like the lead singer of a Brooklyn indie band.

Black Bag by Luke Kennard is published by John Murray (£18.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

Rosie, Guardian reader

Jesus Christ Kinski by Benjamin Myers was an unusual read – a novel about a film about a performance about Jesus. Myers imagines Kinski’s thoughts during his ill-fated final theatre performance of Jesus Christ Saviour in November 1971 where he may have had a mental breakdown and got heckled before storming off stage after the first half. At the same time there is an autofictional account of a certain northern English author writing about viewing this performance on YouTube in 2021. I had no idea who Kinski was before reading this book, and enjoyed the writer’s musings on cancel culture and the dilemma of the creative genius who is a horrible human being. It was a trip inside the thoughts of a highly talented actor and egotist, while being also, dare I use the word, oddly relatable. The performance can be viewed in a documentary by Peter Heyer released in 2008 – it’s available on YouTube, and is compelling viewing.

Sophie Ratcliffe, writer

I’m writing an imaginary biography at the moment, and currently obsessed with Henry James’s tale of biographical intrigue, The Aspern Papers. I love its stalkerish narrator, its precision, its Venetian decay. James will be sharing space in my backpack this weekend with the wonderful Cynthia Ozick. Her Antiquities and Other Stories is a world of stuffed cabinets, lists and waspish narrators. I’ve also packed Calamities – Renee Gladman’s stunning poetic-prose work about the happenstance of drawing and words (or drawing with words?). Each of its 46 chapters starts “I began the day”, which makes it gorgeously, loopily hopeful.

Sophie Ratcliffe has been awarded this year’s EM Forster award. She is the author of books including The Lost Properties of Love

Kate, Guardian reader

I have been loving Flashlight by Susan Choi. It starts with a mystery disappearance of a father on a beach and then explores the disparate backstories and events leading up to it. It’s got a wide-ranging remit – Japanese culture, the occupation of Korea, growing up biracial and the mother’s deterioration through MS. It’s told through the eyes of the mother and daughter, who is one of the most complex child characters I’ve come across in literature. I love how the tension slowly builds towards the truth of what really happened.

The “relentless” focus on measuring literacy progress in schools has “pushed reading for pleasure to the margins”, according to a new report.

“Parents and schools both recognise that reading for pleasure matters, but their understandable focus on literacy skills is actively undermining it,” found the study, which analysed survey data on reading trends among UK children, drawing on data from HarperCollins, NielsenIQ and The Reading Agency.

Daily reading for pleasure among five to 17-year-olds fell from 39% in 2012 to 25% in 2025, data shows, while the proportion of children who rarely or never read for pleasure tripled from 5% to 15%.

However, the study also found that both daily and weekly reading for pleasure increased between 2024 and 2025 among 11- to 17-year-old boys and girls. For 14- to 17-year-old boys, who researchers claim are the “among the hardest-to-reach” in terms of encouraging reading, those who never read fell from 36% to 30% year-on-year.

The data suggested that fewer teens think “books aren’t cool” (down from 45% to 38% between 2024 and 2025 for the 11-17 age group), and fewer say they’d “rather watch TV, play video games or go online than read” (down from 76% to 69% for 14- to 17-year-olds).

Social media is helping teenagers discover books they enjoy, with the proportion reporting finding books via BookTok rising from 23% in 2024 to 27% in 2025 among 14- to 17-year-olds. Among 11- to 17-year-olds, discovery via YouTube rose from 25% to 30%.

The results for younger children were less encouraging. Only 32% of five to 10-year-olds read daily for pleasure last year, a level unchanged for three years and down from 55% in 2012. The proportion of five to 7-year-olds who rarely or never read for pleasure rose from 8% to 11% in a single year.

Barriers to children reading for pleasure include struggling to discover books they enjoy and screens winning their attention.

Removing pressure and making reading a social activity could encourage children to pick up a book more often, researchers said. The report also claimed being read to throughout childhood has a significant impact on a child’s reading habits. Children “who are read to daily are three times more likely to choose to read independently, daily, than if they are read to weekly by their parents,” said HarperCollins consumer insight director Alison David.

Three-fifths of three to seven-year-olds are not read to daily, according to the data. Despite this, 71% of parents with children aged 13 and under said they wished their children would spend more time reading books, an increase from 65% in 2019. Nearly half (41%) of parents believe that reading for pleasure is more important than ever.

When parents with five to 10-year-old children were asked why they read to them, the top two reasons were literacy-focused, and 58% of parents did not select enjoyment as a reason. Parents need to understand “the difference between literacy and reading for pleasure”, stated the report.

Focus groups identified a “fatalistic” attitude among parents, who assume that some children will enjoy reading and others simply won’t. Some parents also believe that reading to their child will make them lazy and less likely to be independent readers.

The report emphasised the importance of reading to children beyond the age when they can “decode” the language themselves. “They still need to be read to for the enjoyment it brings, for habit forming and for encouragement to read independently.”

David suggests that beyond bedtime reading, parents should read to children “often and anywhere” by taking a book to the park, on the bus, or to a coffee shop. “Read to children when they are in the bath, or eating lunch. Make a den, put a blanket over a table and sit in there to read. Build excitement – talk about how excited you are to continue the story to find out what happens next.”

“When you are out, point out things that you see and relate back to books, and use it as a trigger to read again later”, she said, adding that if you see a cat, you might suggest reading a Mog book – the popular series by Judith Kerr – later on. She also suggests putting on “funny voices and accents, really ham it up”, as children “love it”.

The report suggests that by helping parents understand that encouraging reading for pleasure “requires a different approach from supporting literacy – that both are essential, both are achievable – and by giving them practical tools and compelling reasons to act, we can make change happen”.

If you’ve ever been on the receiving end of a five-year-old’s withering “You are not the boss of me” (having caused offense by, say, helping to zip a jacket or tie a shoelace), you’ve seen how young children yearn for power. The draw of books with unreliable storytellers is that they give kids the chance to be in charge, deciding for themselves what the real story is. In a picture book from 2024, “Don’t Think of Tigers” by the South African author-illustrator Alex Latimer, the narrator breaks the fourth wall with an irresistible promise to the reader: “This book in your hands is MAGIC. Here’s how it works—whatever you picture in your mind I will draw on the next page.” The test case—picturing a cow doing ballet—produces a smug bovine pirouetting. But then the narrator cautions, “I really, really can’t draw tigers, so whatever you do, please DON’T THINK OF TIGERS!” Hence the joke of the book: kids listening to the story can’t stop imagining tigers, and, since their wish is the narrator’s command, each ensuing page is filled with a new, very silly iteration of a tiger: shaped like a cube, carrying a briefcase, flaunting a mermaid’s tail. The narrator, who has been getting a lot of practice drawing tigers, turns out to be quite good at it, and the low-key message that mistakes are the pathway to mastery won’t be lost on children, even while they relish bossing the narrator around.

In Daniel Bernstrom’s “One Day at the Bottom of the Deep Blue Sea” (2025), illustrated by Brandon James Scott, the “boss” in the story (and the adult proxy) is a giant toothy shark who meets his match in a little girl determined not to become his supper. Like Scheherazade telling stories to save her own life, the pigtailed scuba diver must convince the shark that there are better things to eat than herself. Kids will quickly see through her ruses. The girl’s menu offerings include a squid squirting ink, a puffer fish that’s “quite a filling treat,” and a delicacy guaranteed to zap the shark cross-eyed:

“Don’t give up,” said the girl.

“Ever thought of boneless meat?

You could try the dotted ray!

It is very safe to eat.”

By the time the girl bamboozles the shark into chomping down on a sea turtle’s hard shell, knocking out his teeth, kids will feel almost as sorry for him as they do gratified at being too wise to fall for such tricks. The shark is a pleasing stand-in for a big bossy grownup, easily fooled. Although Bernstrom’s rhyming verses don’t always scan, they have a rollicking energy perfect for reading aloud, and Scott gives his characters a goofy, cartoonish appeal—round eyes, expressive mouths—amid an undersea palette of rich blues, greens, and purples.

Even as they make both kids and grownups laugh, these picture books grant children a rare authority over the story, allowing and even encouraging young readers to know more than the characters about what’s actually going on. In the real world, it’s an important human skill to recognize another’s viewpoint: to exercise the muscle that identifies when someone has a bias or when their version of a story tilts to their advantage. Anaïs Nin wrote, “We do not see things as they are, we see them as we are.” Books with unreliable storytellers highlight this fundamental aspect of human nature—while urging kids to think more deeply about why we see things the way we do. ♦

John Lanchester, author

I find it hard to read contemporary fiction while I’m in the middle of writing a novel, so I use the time after finishing as an opportunity to catch up. I hugely enjoyed two British novels, Drayton and Mackenzie by Alexander Starritt, about friendship and business, and The New Life by Tom Crewe, about gay life in the 1890s. European fiction: Eurotrash by Christian Kracht is a funny novel about going on a road trip with a deranged parent; Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico is about the horrible life of digital nomads; Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk is an unclassifiable, riveting sort-of mystery.

Look What You Made Me Do by John Lanchester is published by Faber (£20). To support the Guardian order your copy from guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

James, Guardian reader

I am currently reading Tom’s Crossing by Mark Danielewski, author of House of Leaves. This novel is a 1,200-page modern western. I am astounded in every chapter by the depth of the characterisation and the calm, measured attention to detail. The main characters of Kalin and Landry (and their horses) feel as real as any person you would meet on the street. Though the length of the novel may seem daunting to some, I assure you that once you dive in, you will not be able to put it down. I cannot recommend it enough.

Patmeena Sabit, author

When I find myself without long stretches of time for reading, as has been the case lately, I tend to reach for short stories and poetry. Hue and Cry by James Alan McPherson is a brilliant collection of understated and deeply human stories about belonging and loneliness. Fifty-Two Stories by Anton Chekhov (translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky), meanwhile, is an absolute treat because in addition to many of Chekhov’s well-loved short stories, the selection includes pieces previously untranslated into English. And the poems appearing in Bright Dead Things by Ada Limón are beautiful and poignant and feel true.

• Good People by Patmeena Sabit is published by Virago (£16.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

David, Guardian reader

My most recent book is Zbig: The Life of Zbigniew Brzezinski, America’s Cold War Prophet by Edward Luce. A dense autobiography that offers a fascinating glimpse behind the curtain of the US and other world powers from the 1960s through to the beginning of the Trump era. Fascinating in that really we are still struggling with many of the same geopolitical issues today that we were 65 years ago. Dense in that it is written as an almost day-to-day account of conversations that occurred between key people as the world struggled with its own existence. A book to be read and digested piecemeal, but well worth the commitment to finish.

Arash, Guardian reader

Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy is incredibly powerful. Once I started, I could not stop reading, and it left an empty space in my day when I finished it. Having lived in Kerala, it also brought back memories of that time. Yet Mother Mary is so much more than a well-written and well-paced memoir – any piece of writing by Roy will always be. It is a declaration of absolute love for her mother and those around her. Roy transforms her mother’s abrupt and raw character into a form of balanced strength. She calls out chauvinism and stands up to it, walks alongside those who have no voice, and remains kind, loyal, and generous to those close to her. Refreshingly, she avoids stereotypical gender-based jargon and acknowledges those who have supported her, blaming no one but herself when things go wrong. This memoir is a joy to read in these bleak times.

Selina Brown has been named the inaugural National Reading Hero recipient of the Queen’s Reading Room medal, a new literary award unveiled by Queen Camilla.

Brown, founder of the Black British book festival, will receive the honour in recognition of her work establishing Europe’s largest celebration of Black literature and bringing inclusive stories into primary schools in areas with low literacy rates.

Launched in 2025 in response to declining reading rates, the Queen’s Reading Room medal recognises people who “champion books and storytelling” across the UK.

Brown founded the Black British book festival in 2021, born of her frustration at being told her children’s book would not sell because it featured a Black girl on the cover. She launched the first event as a one-day festival; five years on, it has expanded into a year-round platform, hosting events at venues across the UK.

Through her Reading for Smiles programme, Brown has also introduced inclusive books into primary schools in underserved areas of the UK, and has opened two community libraries.

“As a young Black girl growing up in Britain, I found possibility in stories long before I saw it in the world around me. I built this from nothing. No network. No industry access. Just belief – and books,” Brown said.

“As a single mother of three, I put my own savings into a dream that Black British stories deserved a world-class stage,” she added. “To be named the inaugural National Reading Hero […] is beyond anything I imagined when I started. This medal belongs to every child who has ever searched for themselves in a story and not found it.”

Liz Waterland was also named Local Reading Hero for her volunteer work at Deepings Community Library in Lincolnshire over more than a decade, including securing 8,000 signatures on a petition when the library faced closure.

Waterland described the award as a “wonderful honour”, and an acknowledgment “of a lifetime spent helping to make reading accessible and enjoyable for people of all ages, wherever they may be”.

Brown and Waterland were among hundreds of nominations, which were whittled down by a judging panel featuring figures from across Britain’s literary landscape including Lady Gail Rebuck, chair of Penguin Random House UK; Jonathan Douglas, chief executive of the National Literacy Trust; Alison Tweed, chief executive of Book Aid International; Dan Conway, chief executive of the Publishers Association; Sarah Mears, programmes director at Libraries Connected; Nels Abbey, founder of the Black British Writers’ Guild; and the author Ann Cleeves.

“We have been overwhelmed by the extraordinary calibre of nominations received from every corner of the United Kingdom,” said Vicki Perrin, chief executive of the Queen’s Reading Room. “We are thrilled to unveil Selina Brown and Liz Waterland as our winners: Selina for her extraordinary impact on Black British literature and community development, and Liz for the brilliant nature of her work in Lincolnshire.”

The Queen’s Reading Room is a charity founded by Queen Camilla in 2023. It runs an online book club, festivals and other initiatives to promote reading.

Nominations for next year’s medal will open on 1 June and close on 1 October.