Brought to book

Personally I will be glad to never see another rubbish celebratory biography in a book shop and hope that publishers stop spending money on those and spend it more wisely on fiction and non-fiction that might actually entertain, enlighten or inform us for our money.

The weird thing is that the celebratory autobiography market is problematic for publishers - many of the books sell spectacularly badly while only a few (Russell Brand's My Booky Wook is an example) succeed.

I happened to find myself in London last week having lunch with a group of young, black poets. During the lunch a discussion broke out about how to bring young people to poetry and how you can get young people to engage with reading when they may come from backgrounds where books are not found in the house and reading isn't seen as a socially acceptable activity. We were sharing stories about our own reading history and each of our histories was littered with encouraging grandmothers, mothers that read books and inspiring teachers.

We had also all visited the library a lot when we were children. I have very vivid memories of the trips that I would make to the local library when I was a child and how those visits opened out the world of books to me. It amazed me then that I could just borrow the books and take them home to read for free. It still seems magical to me but here I am grown up and buying books every week. Something must have rubbed off.

I didn't grow up in a house full of books - my family couldn't afford that, but I grew up in a house of readers and borrowers and in an extended family network of people that swapped books. In the 1980's I wouldn't have know what a book group was but I still enjoyed talking about Catherine Cookson books with my nana and chomping at the bit while she finished reading the next book that I wanted to borrow from her. Now you can't move for book groups - the North East is awash with them - libraries, cinemas and even pubs have them now. So, there's no excuse not to be joining in with reading.