Stop what you're doing and read this!...

... is a new title from Vintage, published to encourage reading. So I did stop what I was doing, which was reading, to read this book, on the train today. And mostly it was very worthwhile. The opening chapter, the best in the book, was by Zadie Smith entitled "Library Life". There was no mention of previous publication but I thought I had read a version of the chapter elsewhere. No matter, her article was one of the best pieces of advocacy for public libraries I've read. Tory Government Minsters should be strapped to chairs and made to read it. They'd still hate people reading books "on the rates" but at least they might be marginally ashamed. Might.

Zadie Smith described her own family's reading history, and the importance of public libraries in opening up the possibility of other libraries for her - the university libraries she frequents now. But she does not want to pull up the drawbridge behind her. She also sees that even with the university libraries and her private library in her private house that there is the call of spending an afternoon with a toddler in a public library, or the need to research your street in 1894.

Jeanette Winterson reminds us of other things the working class has lost - the brass band, the choir, telling stories down the pub, mending kit, walking - to force-fed adverts and consumerism. Nicholas Carr draws attention to what is on offer to the modern reader of Kerouac's On the Road - apps that come with maps, audio, video clips, slideshows, touchscreen interface. Great, "but I doubt it would have rattled my soul in the way my tattered paperback did." Finally I could have kissed Mark Haddon when he wrote that he often could not remember what happens even in some of my favourite novels, mentioning that he was halfway through the third volume of Proust before coming across marginal notes in his hand showing he had "read it before and forgotten everything". I'm pretty sure I haven't read Proust, but was so pleased to find that another reader just, well, forgets important books while still loving them. And he's younger than me.

I doubt whether any non-reader will be turned on to reading by picking up this book. But we need to remind ourselves of the importance and joy of reading, and this books is good reading and good company. Awful cover though, which is not illustrated here.

ps Five Leaves is a voice in the crowd in this book. Michael Rosen, in an article that was also published in the Guardian, talks about his father Harold Rosen reading aloud to his family, Dickens especially, and from his own memoir Are You Still Circumcised? - which we published, and reprinted, and foolishly allowed to slip out of print.

Twiglets

If you read this early enough you'll just have time to scoot along to some of the last events of the inaugural Manchester Children's Book Festival, www.manchesterchildrensbookfestival.co.uk. A couple of us went up last night to join Sherry Ashworth's table at the gala dinner. Sherry - whose recent book with Five Leaves is Revolution - was pretty high profile over the Festival, today chairing a discussion on teenage fiction with Kevin Brooks and Keith Grey, and Adele Geras depping for Jenny Valentine. Tomorrow she will be hosting an afternoon tea with Frank Cottrell Boyce. Keith was phlegmatic about sales of good young adult books not being brilliant right now, but excited about the amount of good material out there. Kevin put the blame on publishers (we always get it in the neck) because teenage books should be where teenagers go, in Topshop for example. Good point, anyone got a contact for them? He also referred to the current fashion for twiglet books. Everyone else knew what he meant, and laughed. 34 minutes later I did too.
Carol Ann Duffy was pretty much in evidence, the Festival being one of her products, and organised by Manchester Met University Creative Writing team, where she is based. At the gala dinner a couple of her new handwritten poems, one called "Shirt" (Wayne Rooney's England shirt) was particularly good, were auctioned off for about £800 each for the NSPCC, though attention began to wonder when the auction got on to an old copy of the Hello, Hello annual.
Jeanette Winterson, in her after dinner speech, told us about her battle with her adopted mother to read, Mrs Winterson believing that "books are bad for you because by the time you have found out how they end it is too late" (that may not be an exact quote). Her mother burnt Jeanette's hidden book collection. As Keith Grey said today, "books are dangerous". But then he also said that the "twiglet" books are all about how to avoid having sex, so they are not written for the likes of him, because he is a bloke...
Finally, Mary Hoffman was encouraging us all to read the great American young adult writer John Green, who is all but unknown here. Disconcertingly, since he is an American, his website is awash with stuff on the World Cup. Is there no escape?