We like to say people "fall in love with reading," as if it were weather — something that simply happens to the lucky. But run your eye across this week's literary news and a stubbornly different picture emerges. Reading is taught. Writing is taught. Even love, it turns out, is taught. Behind every devoted reader there is almost always someone who handed them a book and stayed to see what happened next.
The clearest example came from the United Kingdom, where — as The Guardian reported — more than 800,000 copies of Katherine Rundell's Impossible Creatures will be given to every year 6 child in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland, and every P6 child in Scotland, this Christmas. Announced by Queen Camilla as The Queen's Christmas Present, the giveaway marks the end of the government's National Year of Reading.
It is worth pausing on the sheer literalness of the gesture. Not a campaign, not a hashtag: a physical book, the same story, placed in the hands of an entire generation at once. That is what transmission looks like when a culture decides reading is too important to leave to chance. Someone chose the book. Someone will ask, in January, whether the child liked it. That follow-up is the whole game.