Why our future depends on reading. Why our future depends on reading books. Literate people read fiction

A great article by writer Neil Gaiman about the nature and benefits of reading. This is not just a vague reflection, but a very clear and consistent proof of seemingly obvious things.

If you have math friends who ask you why read fiction, give them this text. If you have friends who convince you that soon all books will become electronic, give them this text.

If you remember trips to the library with fondness (or vice versa with horror), read this text. If you have growing children, read this text with them, and if you are just thinking about what and how to read with children, even more so, read this text.

It is important for people to explain whose side they are on. A kind of declaration of interests.

Why read fiction

So, I'm going to talk to you about reading and how reading fiction and reading for pleasure is one of the most important things in a person's life.

And I'm obviously very biased, because I'm a writer, a writer of literary texts. I write for both children and adults. I've been making my living through words for about 30 years now, mostly by creating things and writing them down.

Of course, I am interested in people reading, in people reading fiction, in having libraries and librarians to promote the love of reading and the existence of places where one can read. So I'm biased as a writer. But I am much more biased as a reader.

One day I was in New York and heard a conversation about the construction of private prisons - this is a rapidly growing industry in America. The prison industry must plan for its future growth - how many cells will they need? What will the prison population be in 15 years? And they found that they could predict all of this very easily, using a very simple algorithm based on surveys of what percentage of 10 and 11 year olds couldn't read. And, of course, he cannot read for his own pleasure.

There is no direct correlation in this; it cannot be said that there is no crime in an educated society. But the relationship between the factors is visible. I think the simplest of these connections come from the obvious:
Literate people read fiction.

Fiction has two purposes

First, it opens you up to a reading addiction. The hunger to find out what's going to happen next, the urge to turn the page, the need to continue even if it's hard because someone is in trouble and you have to find out how it all ends... that's the real drive. It forces you to learn new words, think differently, and keep moving forward. Discovering that reading itself is a pleasure. Once you realize this, you are on the path to constant reading.

The easiest way to ensure that children are raised literate is to teach them to read and show them that reading is enjoyable entertainment. The simplest thing is to find books that they like, give them access and let them read them.

There are no bad authors for children if children want to read them and seek out their books, because every child is different. They find the stories they need, and they go inside those stories. A hackneyed, tired idea is not hackneyed and hackneyed for them. After all, the child discovers it for the first time.

Don't discourage children from reading just because you think they are reading the wrong things. Literature you don't like is a gateway to books you might like. And not everyone has the same taste as you.

Generates empathy

And the second thing that fiction does is it creates empathy. When you watch a TV show or a movie, you are watching things that happen to other people. Fiction is something you make out of 33 letters and a handful of punctuation marks, and you, you alone, using your imagination, create a world, inhabit it and look around through someone else's eyes.

You begin to feel things, visit places and worlds that you would never have known about. You will learn that the outside world is also you. You become someone else, and when you return to your world, something in you will change a little.

Empathy is a tool that brings people together and allows them to behave not like narcissistic loners.

You also find in books something vital for existence in this world. And here it is: the world doesn't have to be like this. Everything can change.

In 2007, I was in China for the first Party-approved science fiction and fantasy convention. At some point I asked the official representative of the authorities: why? After all, SF was not approved for a long time. What changed?

It's simple, he told me:

The Chinese created great things if you brought them designs. But they didn’t improve or invent anything themselves. They didn't invent. And so they sent a delegation to the USA, to Apple, Microsoft, Google and asked the people who were inventing the future about themselves. And they discovered that they read science fiction when they were boys and girls.

Literature can show you a different world. She can take you places you've never been before. Once you have visited other worlds, like those who have tasted the magic fruit, you can never be completely satisfied with the world in which you grew up. Dissatisfaction is a good thing. Dissatisfied people can change and improve their worlds, make them better, make them different.

A surefire way to ruin a child's love of reading is, of course, to make sure there are no books around. And there are no places where children could read them. I'm lucky. When I was growing up, I had a great local library. I had parents who could be persuaded to drop me off at the library on their way to work during the holidays.

Libraries are freedom

I think it all comes down to the nature of information. Information has a price, and the right information is priceless. Throughout human history, we have lived in times of information scarcity. Getting the information you need has always been important and always cost something. When to plant crops, where to find things, maps, stories and stories - these are things that have always been valued over food and in company. Information was a valuable thing, and those who possessed it or obtained it could expect rewards.

In recent years, we have moved from a lack of information to an oversaturation of it. According to Google's Eric Schmidt, the human race now creates as much information every two days as we did from the beginning of our civilization until 2003. That's something like five exobytes of information per day, if you like numbers.

Now the task is not to find a rare flower in the desert, but to find a specific plant in the jungle. We need help navigating through this information to find what we really need.

Books are a way to communicate with the dead. It is a way to learn from those who are no longer with us. Humanity created itself, developed, and gave birth to a type of knowledge that can be developed rather than constantly memorized. There are tales that are older than many countries, tales that have long outlived the cultures and walls in which they were first told.

If you don't value libraries, then you don't value information, culture or wisdom. You silence the voices of the past and harm the future.

We must read aloud to our children. Read to them something that makes them happy. Reading to them stories that we are already tired of. Speak in different voices, interest them and not stop reading just because they themselves have learned to do it. Making reading aloud a moment of togetherness, a time when no one is looking at their phones, when the temptations of the world are put aside.

We must use language. Develop, learn what new words mean and how to use them, communicate clearly, say what we mean. We shouldn't try to freeze language, pretend it's a dead thing that needs to be honored. We must use language as a living thing that moves, that carries words, that allows their meanings and pronunciation to change over time.

Writers—especially children's writers—have an obligation to their readers. We must write truthful things, which is especially important when we write stories about people who did not exist, or places we have not been to, to understand that truth is not what actually happened, but what is told to us. who are we?

After all, literature is a true lie, among other things. We must not bore our readers, but make them want to turn the next page. One of the best remedies for reluctant readers is a story they can't put down.

We must tell our readers the truth, equip them, provide protection and pass on the wisdom that we have gleaned from our short stay in this green world.

We must not preach, lecture, or shove ready-made truths down the throats of our readers, like birds who feed their chicks pre-chewed worms. And we should never, for anything in the world, under any circumstances, write for children anything that we would not want to read ourselves.

All of us - adults and children, writers and readers - must dream. We have to invent. It's easy to pretend that no one can change anything, that we live in a world where society is huge and the individual is less than nothing, an atom in a wall, a grain in a rice field. But the truth is that individuals change the world again and again, individuals create the future, and they do it by imagining that things could be different.

Look around. I'm serious. Stop for a moment and look at the room you are in. I want to show something so obvious that everyone has already forgotten it. Here it is: everything you see, including the walls, was invented at some point. Someone decided that it would be much easier to sit on a chair than on the ground, and came up with a chair.

Someone had to come up with a way for me to be able to talk to all of you in London right now without getting wet. This room and all the things in it, all the things in the building, in this city, exist because over and over again people come up with something.

We must make things beautiful. Don't make the world uglier than it was before us, don't empty the oceans, don't pass on our problems to future generations. We must clean up after ourselves and not leave our children in a world that we have so stupidly ruined, stolen and mutilated.

Albert Einstein was once asked how we can make our children smarter. His answer was simple and wise. If you want your children to be smart, he said, read them stories. If you want them to be even smarter, read them more fairy tales. He understood the value of reading and imagination.

I hope that we can pass on to our children a world where they will read and be read to, where they will imagine and understand.

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It is important for people to explain whose side they are on and why, and whether they are biased. A kind of declaration of interests. So I'm going to talk to you about reading. That reading fiction, reading for pleasure is one of the most important things in a person’s life.

And I'm obviously very biased, because I'm a writer, a writer of fiction. I write for both children and adults. I've been making my living through words for about 30 years now, mostly by creating things and writing them down. Of course, I am interested in people reading, in people reading fiction, in having libraries and librarians to promote the love of reading and the existence of places where one can read.

So I'm biased as a writer. But I am much more biased as a reader.

One day I was in New York and heard a conversation about the construction of private prisons - this is a rapidly growing industry in America. The prison industry must plan for its future growth - how many cells will they need? What will the prison population be in 15 years? And they found that they could predict all of this very easily, using a very simple algorithm based on surveys of what percentage of 10 and 11 year olds couldn't read. And, of course, he cannot read for his own pleasure.

There is no direct correlation in this; it cannot be said that there is no crime in an educated society. But the relationship between the factors is visible.

I think the simplest of these connections come from the obvious.

Literate people read fiction.

Fiction has two purposes.

• First, it opens you up to a reading addiction. The hunger to find out what's going to happen next, the urge to turn the page, the need to continue even if it's hard because someone's in trouble and you have to find out how it all ends...there's a real drive there. It forces you to learn new words, think differently, and keep moving forward. Discovering that reading itself is a pleasure. Once you realize this, you are on the path to constant reading.

The easiest way to ensure that children are raised literate is to teach them to read and show them that reading is enjoyable entertainment. The simplest thing is to find books they like, give them access to those books and let them read them.

There are no bad authors for children if children want to read them and seek out their books, because every child is different. They find the stories they need, and they go inside those stories. A hackneyed, tired idea is not hackneyed and hackneyed for them. After all, the child discovers it for the first time. Don't discourage children from reading just because you think they are reading the wrong things.

• And the second thing that fiction does is it creates empathy. When you watch a TV show or a movie, you are watching things that happen to other people. Fiction is something you make out of 33 letters and a handful of punctuation marks, and you, you alone, using your imagination, create a world, inhabit it and look around through someone else's eyes. You begin to feel things, visit places and worlds that you would never have known about. You will learn that the outside world is also you. You become someone else, and when you return to your world, something in you will change a little.

Empathy is a tool that brings people together and allows them to behave not like narcissistic loners.

You also find in books something vital for existence in this world. And here it is: the world doesn't have to be like this. Everything can change.

In 2007, I was in China for the first Party-approved science fiction and fantasy convention. At some point I asked the official representative of the authorities: why? After all, SF was not approved for a long time. What changed?

It's simple, he told me. The Chinese created great things if you brought them designs. But they didn’t improve or invent anything themselves. They didn't invent. And so they sent a delegation to the USA, to Apple, Microsoft, Google and asked the people who were inventing the future about themselves. And they discovered that they read science fiction when they were boys and girls.

Literature can show you a different world. She can take you places you've never been before. Once you have visited other worlds, like those who have tasted the magic fruit, you can never be completely satisfied with the world in which you grew up. Dissatisfaction is a good thing. Dissatisfied people can change and improve their worlds, make them better, make them different.

Another way to ruin a child's love of reading is, of course, to make sure there are no books around. And there are no places where children could read them. I'm lucky. When I was growing up, I had a great local library.

Libraries are freedom. Freedom to read, freedom to communicate.

It is education (which does not end the day we leave school or university), it is leisure, it is refuge and it is access to information.

I think it all comes down to the nature of information. Information has a price, and the right information is priceless. Throughout human history, we have lived in times of information scarcity.

In recent years, we have moved from a lack of information to an oversaturation of it. According to Google's Eric Schmidt, the human race now creates as much information every two days as we did from the beginning of our civilization until 2003. That's something like five exabytes of information per day, if you like numbers. Now the task is not to find a rare flower in the desert, but to find a specific plant in the jungle. We need help navigating through this information to find what we really need.

• Libraries are places where people come for information. Books are just the tip of the information iceberg, they are there, and librarians can freely and legally provide you with books. More children are borrowing books from libraries than ever before, and they come in a variety of books—paper books, e-books, and audiobooks. But libraries are also, for example, places where people who don't have a computer or Internet access can go online. This is terribly important in times when we are looking for work, sending out resumes, applying for pensions on the Internet. Librarians can help these people navigate the world.
• Libraries are the gateway to the future. So it is a shame that all over the world we see local authorities seeing library closures as an easy way to save money, not realizing that they are robbing the future to pay for today. They close gates that should be open.
• Books are a way to communicate with the dead. It is a way to learn from those who are no longer with us. Humanity created itself, developed, and gave birth to a type of knowledge that can be developed rather than constantly memorized. There are tales that are older than many countries, tales that have long outlived the cultures and walls in which they were first told.

Libraries need to be supported. Use libraries, encourage others to use them, protest their closure.

If you don't value libraries, then you don't value information, culture or wisdom.

• We must read aloud to our children. Read to them something that makes them happy. Reading to them stories that we are already tired of. Speak in different voices, interest them and not stop reading just because they themselves have learned to do it. Making reading aloud a moment of togetherness, a time when no one is looking at their phones, when the temptations of the world are put aside.

• We must use language. Develop, learn what new words mean and how to use them, communicate clearly, say what we mean. We shouldn't try to freeze language, pretend it's a dead thing that needs to be honored. We must use language as a living thing that moves, that carries words, that allows their meanings and pronunciation to change over time.

Writers—especially children's writers—have an obligation to their readers. We must write truthful things, which is especially important when we write stories about people who did not exist, or places we have not been to, to understand that the truth is not what actually happened, but what it tells us. who are we? After all, literature is a true lie, among other things. We must not bore our readers, but make them want to turn the next page.

One of the best remedies for reluctant readers is a story they can't put down.

• We must tell our readers the truth, equip them, provide protection and pass on the wisdom that we have gleaned from our short stay in this green world. We must not preach, lecture, or shove ready-made truths down the throats of our readers, like birds who feed their chicks pre-chewed worms. And we should never, for anything in the world, under any circumstances, write for children anything that we would not want to read ourselves.
• All of us - adults and children, writers and readers - must dream. We have to invent. It's easy to pretend that no one can change anything, that we live in a world where society is huge and the individual is less than nothing, an atom in a wall, a grain in a rice field. But the truth is that individuals change the world again and again, individuals create the future, and they do it by imagining that things could be different.

Look around. I'm serious. Stop for a moment and look at the room you are in. I want to show something so obvious that everyone has already forgotten it. Here it is: everything you see, including the walls, was invented at some point. Someone decided that it would be much easier to sit on a chair than on the ground, and came up with a chair. Someone had to come up with a way for me to be able to talk to all of you in London right now without getting wet. This room and all the things in it, all the things in the building, in this city, exist because over and over again people come up with something.

• We must make things beautiful. Don't make the world uglier than it was before us, don't empty the oceans, don't pass on our problems to future generations. We must clean up after ourselves and not leave our children in a world that we have so stupidly ruined, stolen and mutilated.

Albert Einstein was once asked how we can make our children smarter. His answer was simple and wise. If you want your children to be smart, he said, read them stories. If you want them to be even smarter, read them more fairy tales. He understood the value of reading and imagination. I hope that we can pass on to our children a world where they will read and be read to, where they will imagine and understand.

A great article by writer Neil Gaiman about the nature and benefits of reading. This is not just a vague reflection, but a very clear and consistent proof of seemingly obvious things.

If you have math friends who ask you why read fiction, give them this text. If you have friends who convince you that soon all books will become electronic, give them this text. If you remember trips to the library with fondness (or vice versa with horror), read this text. If you have growing children, read this text with them, and if you are just thinking about what and how to read with children, even more so, read this text.

It is important for people to explain whose side they are on. A kind of declaration of interests.

So, I'm going to talk to you about reading and how reading fiction and reading for pleasure is one of the most important things in a person's life.

And I'm obviously very biased, because I'm a writer, a writer of literary texts. I write for both children and adults. I've been making my living through words for about 30 years now, mostly by creating things and writing them down. Of course, I am interested in people reading, in people reading fiction, in having libraries and librarians to promote the love of reading and the existence of places where one can read. So I'm biased as a writer. But I am much more biased as a reader.

One day I was in New York and heard a conversation about the construction of private prisons - this is a rapidly growing industry in America. The prison industry must plan for its future growth - how many cells will they need? What will the prison population be in 15 years? And they found that they could predict all of this very easily, using a very simple algorithm based on surveys of what percentage of 10 and 11 year olds couldn't read. And, of course, he cannot read for his own pleasure.

There is no direct correlation in this; it cannot be said that there is no crime in an educated society. But the relationship between the factors is visible. I think the simplest of these connections come from the obvious:
Literate people read fiction.

Fiction has two purposes:

• First, it opens you up to a reading addiction.. The hunger to find out what's going to happen next, the urge to turn the page, the need to continue even if it's hard because someone is in trouble and you have to find out how it all ends... that's the real drive. It forces you to learn new words, think differently, and keep moving forward. Discovering that reading itself is a pleasure. Once you realize this, you are on the path to constant reading.
• The easiest way to ensure that children are raised literate is to teach them to read and show them that reading is enjoyable entertainment. The simplest thing is to find books that they like, give them access and let them read them.
• There are no bad authors for children if children want to read them and seek out their books, because every child is different. They find the stories they need, and they go inside those stories. A hackneyed, tired idea is not hackneyed and hackneyed for them. After all, the child discovers it for the first time. Don't discourage children from reading just because you think they are reading the wrong things. Literature you don't like is a gateway to books you might like. And not everyone has the same taste as you.
• And the second thing that fiction does is it creates empathy.. When you watch a TV show or a movie, you are watching things that happen to other people. Fiction is something you make out of 33 letters and a handful of punctuation marks, and you, you alone, using your imagination, create a world, inhabit it and look around through someone else's eyes. You begin to feel things, visit places and worlds that you would never have known about. You will learn that the outside world is also you. You become someone else, and when you return to your world, something in you will change a little.

Empathy is a tool that brings people together and allows them to behave not like narcissistic loners.
You also find in books something vital for existence in this world. And here it is: the world doesn't have to be like this. Everything can change.

In 2007, I was in China for the first Party-approved science fiction and fantasy convention. At some point I asked the official representative of the authorities: why? After all, SF was not approved for a long time. What changed?

It's simple, he told me. The Chinese created great things if you brought them designs. But they didn’t improve or invent anything themselves. They didn't invent. And so they sent a delegation to the USA, to Apple, Microsoft, Google and asked the people who were inventing the future about themselves. And they discovered that they read science fiction when they were boys and girls.

Literature can show you another world. She can take you places you've never been before. Once you have visited other worlds, like those who have tasted the magic fruit, you can never be completely satisfied with the world in which you grew up. Dissatisfaction is a good thing. Dissatisfied people can change and improve their worlds, make them better, make them different.

A Sure Way to Destroy a Child's Love of Reading- this, of course, is to make sure that there are no books nearby. And there are no places where children could read them. I'm lucky. When I was growing up, I had a great local library. I had parents who could be persuaded to drop me off at the library on their way to work during the holidays.

Libraries are freedom. Freedom to read, freedom to communicate. It is education (which does not end the day we leave school or university), it is leisure, it is refuge and it is access to information.

I think it's all about the nature of the information.. Information has a price, and the right information is priceless. Throughout human history, we have lived in times of information scarcity. Getting the information you need has always been important and always cost something. When to plant crops, where to find things, maps, stories and stories - these are things that have always been valued over food and in company. Information was a valuable thing, and those who possessed it or obtained it could expect rewards.

In recent years, we have moved from a lack of information to an oversaturation of it.. According to Google's Eric Schmidt, the human race now creates as much information every two days as we did from the beginning of our civilization until 2003. That's something like five exobytes of information per day, if you like numbers. Now the task is not to find a rare flower in the desert, but to find a specific plant in the jungle. We need help navigating through this information to find what we really need.

Books are a way to communicate with the dead. It is a way to learn from those who are no longer with us. Humanity created itself, developed, and gave birth to a type of knowledge that can be developed rather than constantly memorized. There are tales that are older than many countries, tales that have long outlived the cultures and walls in which they were first told.

If you don't value libraries, then you don't value information, culture or wisdom. You silence the voices of the past and harm the future.

We must read aloud to our children. Read to them something that makes them happy. Reading to them stories that we are already tired of. Speak in different voices, interest them and not stop reading just because they themselves have learned to do it. Making reading aloud a moment of togetherness, a time when no one is looking at their phones, when the temptations of the world are put aside.

We must use language. Develop, learn what new words mean and how to use them, communicate clearly, say what we mean. We shouldn't try to freeze language, pretend it's a dead thing that needs to be honored. We must use language as a living thing that moves, that carries words, that allows their meanings and pronunciation to change over time.

Writers—especially children's writers—have an obligation to their readers. We must write truthful things, which is especially important when we write stories about people who did not exist, or places we have not been to, to understand that truth is not what actually happened, but what is told to us. who are we?

After all, literature is a true lie, among other things. We must not bore our readers, but make them want to turn the next page. One of the best remedies for reluctant readers is a story they can't put down.

We must tell our readers the truth, arm them, give them protection and convey the wisdom that we managed to glean from our short stay in this green world. We must not preach, lecture, or shove ready-made truths down the throats of our readers, like birds who feed their chicks pre-chewed worms. And we should never, for anything in the world, under any circumstances, write for children anything that we would not want to read ourselves.

All of us - adults and children, writers and readers - must dream. We have to invent. It's easy to pretend that no one can change anything, that we live in a world where society is huge and the individual is less than nothing, an atom in a wall, a grain in a rice field. But the truth is that individuals change the world again and again, individuals create the future, and they do it by imagining that things could be different.

Look around. I'm serious. Stop for a moment and look at the room you are in. I want to show something so obvious that everyone has already forgotten it. Here it is: everything you see, including the walls, was invented at some point. Someone decided that it would be much easier to sit on a chair than on the ground, and came up with a chair. Someone had to come up with a way for me to be able to talk to all of you in London right now without getting wet. This room and all the things in it, all the things in the building, in this city, exist because over and over again people come up with something.

We must make things beautiful. Don't make the world uglier than it was before us, don't empty the oceans, don't pass on our problems to future generations. We must clean up after ourselves and not leave our children in a world that we have so stupidly ruined, stolen and mutilated.

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Neil Gaiman

Neil Gaiman gave an outstanding lecture on the nature and benefits of reading. This is not just a passionate apology, not a vague reflection, so typical of intellectuals in the humanities, but a very clear, consistent proof of seemingly obvious things. If you have math friends who ask you why read fiction, give them this text. If you have friends who convince you that soon all books will become exclusively electronic, give them this text. If you remember trips to the library with fondness (or vice versa with horror), read this text. If you have growing children, read this text with them, and if you are just thinking about what and how to read with children, even more so, read this text.

Neil Gaiman gave an outstanding lecture on the nature and benefits of reading. This is not just a passionate apology, not a vague reflection, so typical of intellectuals in the humanities, but a very clear, consistent proof of seemingly obvious things. If you have math friends who ask you why read fiction, give them this text. If you have friends who convince you that soon all books will become exclusively electronic, give them this text. If you remember trips to the library with fondness (or vice versa with horror), read this text. If you have growing children, read this text with them, and if you are just thinking about what and how to read with children, even more so, read this text.

Reading and translating this text, I thought about my mother, who works in the library among those who figure out how to keep it useful and necessary for people of the 21st century.

I thought about my grandmother's aunt, who worked in the library.

I thought about my grandmother, who loved to read more than anything in the world and who sent textbooks to her brother, begging him to study and read.

I thought of myself working every day to make it convenient and interesting for people to buy and read paper books. It's in our blood. This is what determines our lives, what can no longer be taken away from us. And I am infinitely glad to hear and read that everything that is so valuable to us also worries Neil Gaiman.

It is important for people to explain whose side they are on and why, and whether they are biased. A kind of declaration of interests. So I'm going to talk to you about reading. I'm going to tell you that libraries are important. I'm going to suggest that reading fiction, reading for pleasure, is one of the most important things in a person's life. I am going to passionately implore people to recognize what libraries and librarians are and to preserve both.

And I'm obviously very biased, because I'm a writer, a writer of literary texts. I write for both children and adults. I've been making my living through words for about 30 years now, mostly by creating things and writing them down. Of course, I am interested in people reading, in people reading fiction, in having libraries and librarians to promote the love of reading and the existence of places where one can read.

So I'm biased as a writer. But I am much more biased as a reader. And I'm even more biased as a British citizen.

I'm making this speech today under the auspices of the Reading Agency, a charity whose mission is to give everyone a fair chance in life and to help everyone become confident and engaged readers. This includes supporting educational programs, libraries and individuals, as well as openly and selflessly encouraging the act of reading itself. Because, as they say, everything changes when we read.

It is this change and this act of reading that I want to talk about today. I want to talk about what reading does to us. What is it created for?

One day I was in New York and heard a conversation about the construction of private prisons - this is a rapidly growing industry in America. The prison industry must plan for its future growth - how many cells will they need? What will the prison population be in 15 years? And they found that they could predict all of this very easily, using a very simple algorithm based on surveys of what percentage of 10 and 11 year olds couldn't read. And of course he cannot read for his own pleasure.

There is no direct correlation in this; it cannot be said that there is no crime in an educated society. But the relationship between the factors is visible..

I think the simplest of these connections come from the obvious. Literate people read fiction.

Fiction has two purposes. First, it opens you up to a reading addiction. The hunger to find out what's going to happen next, the urge to turn the page, the need to continue even if it's hard because someone's in trouble and you have to find out how it all ends...there's a real drive there. It forces you to learn new words, think differently, and keep moving forward. Discovering that reading itself is a pleasure. Once you realize this, you are on the path to constant reading. Reading is the key. Years ago I heard people say that we live in a “post-literate” world, where the ability to extract meaning from written text is secondary, but those days are over. Words are more important now than ever, we explore the world through words, and as the world slides into the world wide web, we follow it to communicate and understand what we read. People who don't understand each other can't exchange ideas, can't communicate, and translation programs only make things worse.

The easiest way to ensure that children are raised literate is to teach them to read and show them that reading is enjoyable entertainment. The simplest thing is to find books they like, give them access to those books, and let them read them.

I don't think there is such a thing as a bad children's book. Time and time again, it has become fashionable among adults to point to certain children's books, often an entire genre or author, and proclaim them to be bad books, books that children should be protected from reading. I've seen it happen time and time again, Enid Blyton being called a bad author, it happened to Robert Lawrence Stein and countless others. Comics were condemned for promoting illiteracy.

This is bullshit. This is snobbery and stupidity. There are no bad authors for children if children want to read them and seek out their books, because every child is different. They find the stories they need, and they go inside those stories. A hackneyed, tired idea is not hackneyed and hackneyed for them. After all, the child discovers it for the first time. Don't discourage children from reading just because you think they are reading the wrong things. Literature you don't like is a gateway to books you might like. And not everyone has the same taste as you.

Well-intentioned adults can easily destroy a child's love of reading: stop them from reading what they like, or give them decent but boring books, those modern equivalents of Victorian "educational" literature. You'll be left with a generation convinced that reading is uncool, or worse, unpleasant.

We need our children to get on the reading ladder: everything they like will move them, step by step, towards literacy. (And don't ever make the mistake the author made when his 11-year-old daughter was reading R.L. Stine. The mistake was going to her and handing her a copy of Stephen King's Carrie and saying, "If you love Stine, You'll like this too!" Holly read nothing but harmless stories about settlers on the prairie until her late teens, and she still glares at me when she hears the name Stephen King.)

And the second thing that fiction does is it creates empathy. When you watch a TV show or a movie, you are watching things that happen to other people. Fiction is something you make out of 33 letters and a handful of punctuation marks, and you, you alone, using your imagination, create a world, inhabit it and look around through someone else's eyes. You begin to feel things, visit places and worlds that you would never have known about. You will learn that the outside world is also you. You become someone else, and when you return to your world, something in you will change a little.

Empathy is a tool that brings people together and allows them to behave not like narcissistic loners.

You also find in books something vital for existence in this world. And here it is: the world doesn't have to be like this. Everything can change.

In 2007, I was in China for the first Party-approved science fiction and fantasy convention. At some point I asked the official representative of the authorities: why? After all, SF was not approved for a long time. What changed?

It's simple, he told me. The Chinese created great things if you brought them designs. But they didn’t improve or invent anything themselves. They didn't invent. And so they sent a delegation to the USA, to Apple, Microsoft, Google and asked the people who were inventing the future about themselves. And they discovered that they read science fiction when they were boys and girls.

Literature can show you a different world. She can take you places you've never been before. Once you have visited other worlds, like those who have tasted the magic fruit, you can never be completely satisfied with the world in which you grew up. Dissatisfaction is a good thing. Dissatisfied people can change and improve their worlds, make them better, make them different.

And before we go off topic, I would like to say a few words about escapism. This term is pronounced as if it is something bad. As if “escapist” literature is a cheap dope, needed only by the confused, fooled and misled. And the only literature worthy of children and adults is imitative literature, reflecting all the worst in this world.

If you found yourself in an impossible situation, in an unpleasant place, among people who did not wish you any good, and someone offered you a temporary leave from there, would you really not accept it? This is exactly what escapist literature is, it is literature that opens the door, shows that there is sun outside, gives you a place to go if you are being controlled, and people you want to be with (and books are real places, don’t doubt it ). And more importantly, during such an escape, books can give you knowledge about the world and your troubles, they give you weapons, they give you protection: authentic things that you can take with you to prison. Knowledge and skills that can be used for a real escape.

As J. R. R. Tolkien reminds us, the only people who protest against escape are the jailers.

Another way to ruin a child's love of reading is, of course, to make sure there are no books around. And there are no places where children could read them. I'm lucky. When I was growing up, I had a great local library. I had parents who could be persuaded to drop me off at the library on their way to work during the summer holidays. And the librarians who received the little lonely boy who returned to the library every morning and studied the catalog of cards, looking for books with ghosts or magic or rockets in them, books with vampires or mysteries, with witches and miracles. And when I read the entire children's library, I started reading adult books.

They were good librarians. They loved books and loved to be read. They taught me how to order books from other libraries through interlibrary loan. They had no snobbery about what I was reading. They seemed to like a wide-eyed boy who loved to read. They talked to me about the books they had read, they found me other books in the series, they helped. They treated me like an ordinary reader—no more and no less—and that meant they respected me. At 8 years old, I was not used to being respected.

I'm afraid that in the 21st century people don't quite understand what libraries are and what their purpose is. If you think of a library as a shelf of books, it may seem old and outdated in a world where most, but not all, books exist in electronic form. But this is a fundamental mistake.

I think it all comes down to the nature of information. Information has a price, and the right information is priceless. Throughout human history, we have lived in times of information scarcity. Getting the information you need has always been important and always cost something. When to plant crops, where to find things, maps, stories and stories - these are things that have always been valued over food and in company. Information was a valuable thing, and those who possessed it or obtained it could expect rewards.

In recent years, we have moved from a lack of information to an oversaturation of it. According to Google's Eric Schmidt, the human race now creates as much information every two days as we did from the beginning of our civilization until 2003. That's something like five exobytes of information per day, if you like numbers. Now the task is not to find a rare flower in the desert, but to find a specific plant in the jungle. We need help navigating through this information to find what we really need.

Libraries are places where people come for information. Books are just the tip of the information iceberg, they are there, and librarians can freely and legally provide you with books. More children are borrowing books from libraries than ever before, and they come in a variety of books—paper books, e-books, and audiobooks. But libraries are also, for example, places where people who don’t have a computer or Internet access can go online. This is terribly important in times when we are looking for work, sending out resumes, applying for pensions on the Internet. Librarians can help these people navigate the world.

I don't think all books should or will make it to the screen. As Douglas Adams once noted, 20 years before the Kindle, a paper book is like a shark. Sharks are old, they lived in the ocean before dinosaurs. And the reason why sharks still exist is because sharks are the best at being sharks. Paper books are durable, difficult to destroy, waterproof, work in sunlight, fit comfortably in the hand - they are good as books, and there will always be a place for them. They belong to libraries, even if libraries have already become a place where you can access e-books, audiobooks, DVDs and Internet content.

A library is a repository of information that gives every citizen equal access to it. This includes health information. And about mental health. This is a place for communication. This is a secluded place, a refuge from the outside world. This is a place with librarians. We can already imagine what the libraries of the future will be like.

Literacy has become more important than ever in this world of text messages and emails, in the world of written information. We must read and write, and we need open-minded citizens who can read comfortably, understand what they read, understand nuance, and be understood by others.

Libraries are truly the gateway to the future. So it is a shame that all over the world we see local authorities seeing library closures as an easy way to save money, not realizing that they are robbing the future to pay for today. They close gates that should be open.

According to a recent study by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Growth, England is the only country where the older population is more literate and larger than the younger population, when these indicators are compared with other factors such as gender, socio-economic indicators and type of employment.

In other words, our children and grandchildren are not as literate as we are, and there are fewer of them than us. They are less able to navigate the world, understand it, and solve problems. They are easier to deceive and confuse, they have fewer opportunities to change their world, and they are less able to work. Yes, all of the above. And England as a country will fall under the onslaught of more developed nations, because it will lack skilled labor.

Books are a way to communicate with the dead. It is a way to learn from those who are no longer with us. Humanity created itself, developed, and gave birth to a type of knowledge that can be developed rather than constantly memorized. There are tales that are older than many countries, tales that have long outlived the cultures and walls in which they were first told.

I believe that we have a responsibility to the future. Responsibility and obligation to children, to the adults these children will become, to the world in which they will live. We all—readers, writers, citizens—have obligations. Perhaps I will try to formulate some of them.

I believe we should read for pleasure, privately and in public. If we read for pleasure, if others see us reading, we learn, we train our imagination. We show others that reading is good.

We must support libraries. Use libraries, encourage others to use them, protest their closure. If you don't value libraries, then you don't value information, culture or wisdom. You silence the voices of the past and harm the future.

We must read aloud to our children. Read to them something that makes them happy. Reading to them stories that we are already tired of. Speak in different voices, interest them and not stop reading just because they themselves have learned to do it. Making reading aloud a moment of togetherness, a time when no one is looking at their phones, when the temptations of the world are put aside.

We must use language. Develop, learn what new words mean and how to use them, communicate clearly, say what we mean. We shouldn't try to freeze language, pretend it's a dead thing that needs to be honored. We must use language as a living thing that moves, that carries words, that allows their meanings and pronunciation to change over time.

Writers—especially children's writers—have an obligation to their readers. We must write truthful things, which is especially important when we write stories about people who did not exist, or places we have not been to, to understand that truth is not what actually happened, but what is told to us. who are we? After all, literature is a true lie, among other things. We must not bore our readers, but make them want to turn the next page. One of the best remedies for reluctant readers is a story they can't put down.

We must tell our readers the truth, equip them, provide protection and pass on the wisdom that we have gleaned from our short stay in this green world. We must not preach, lecture, or shove ready-made truths down the throats of our readers, like birds who feed their chicks pre-chewed worms. And we should never, for anything in the world, under any circumstances, write for children anything that we would not want to read ourselves.

We must understand and acknowledge that as children's writers we are doing important work, because if we fail and write boring books that turn children away from reading and books, then we will drain our future and degrade them further.

All of us - adults and children, writers and readers - must dream. We have to invent. It's easy to pretend that no one can change anything, that we live in a world where society is huge and the individual is less than nothing, an atom in a wall, a grain in a rice field. But the truth is that individuals change the world again and again, individuals create the future, and they do it by imagining that things could be different.

Look around. I'm serious. Stop for a moment and look at the room you are in. I want to show something so obvious that everyone has already forgotten it. Here it is: everything you see, including the walls, was invented at some point. Someone decided that it would be much easier to sit on a chair than on the ground, and came up with a chair. Someone had to come up with a way for me to be able to talk to all of you in London right now without the risk of getting wet. This room and all the things in it, all the things in the building, in this city, exist because over and over again people come up with something.

We must make things beautiful. Don't make the world uglier than it was before us, don't empty the oceans, don't pass on our problems to future generations. We must clean up after ourselves and not leave our children in a world that we have so stupidly ruined, stolen and mutilated.

We must tell our politicians what we want, vote against politicians of any party who do not understand the role of reading in creating real citizens, politicians who are unwilling to act to preserve and protect knowledge and promote literacy. This is not a matter of politics. This is a matter of ordinary humanity.

If you have friends who ask why read fiction, give them this lecture by Neil Gaiman.

“It is important for people to explain which side they are on and why, and whether they are biased. A kind of declaration of interests. So I'm going to talk to you about reading. That reading fiction, reading for pleasure is one of the most important things in a person’s life. And I'm obviously very biased, because I'm a writer, a writer of fiction. I write for both children and adults. I've been making my living through words for about 30 years now, mostly by creating things and writing them down. Of course, I am interested in people reading, in people reading fiction, in having libraries and librarians to promote the love of reading and the existence of places where one can read. So I'm biased as a writer. But I am much more biased as a reader. One day I was in New York and heard a conversation about the construction of private prisons - this is a rapidly growing industry in America. The prison industry must plan for its future growth. How many cameras will they need? What will the prison population be in 15 years? And they found that they could predict all of this very easily, using a very simple algorithm based on surveys of what percentage of 10 and 11 year olds couldn't read. And, of course, he cannot read for his own pleasure. There is no direct correlation in this; it cannot be said that there is no crime in an educated society. But the relationship between the factors is visible. I think the simplest of these connections come from the obvious.

Literate people read fiction. Fiction has two purposes. First, it opens you up to a reading addiction. The hunger to find out what's going to happen next, the urge to turn the page, the need to continue even if it's hard because someone's in trouble and you have to find out how it all ends...there's a real drive there. It forces you to learn new words, think differently, and keep moving forward. Discovering that reading itself is a pleasure. Once you realize this, you are on the path to constant reading. The easiest way to ensure that children are raised literate is to teach them to read and show them that reading is enjoyable entertainment. The simplest thing is to find books they like, give them access to those books and let them read them. There are no bad authors for children if children want to read them and seek out their books, because every child is different. They find the stories they need, and they go inside those stories. A hackneyed, tired idea is not hackneyed and hackneyed for them. After all, the child discovers it for the first time. Don't discourage children from reading just because you think they are reading the wrong things. And the second thing that fiction does is it creates empathy. When you watch a TV show or a movie, you are watching things that happen to other people. Fiction is something you make out of 33 letters and a handful of punctuation marks, and you, you alone, using your imagination, create a world, inhabit it and look around through someone else's eyes. You begin to feel things, visit places and worlds that you would never have known about. You will learn that the outside world is also you. You become someone else, and when you return to your world, something in you will change a little. Empathy is a tool that brings people together and allows them to behave not like narcissistic loners.

You also find in books something vital for existence in this world. And here it is: the world doesn't have to be like this. Everything can change. In 2007, I was in China for the first Party-approved science fiction and fantasy convention. At some point I asked the official representative of the authorities: why? After all, SF was not approved for a long time. What changed? It's simple, he told me. The Chinese created great things if you brought them designs. But they didn’t improve or invent anything themselves. They didn't invent. And so they sent a delegation to the USA, to Apple, Microsoft, Google and asked the people who were inventing the future about themselves. And they discovered that they read science fiction when they were boys and girls. Literature can show you a different world. She can take you places you've never been before. Once you have visited other worlds, like those who have tasted the magic fruit, you can never be completely satisfied with the world in which you grew up. Dissatisfaction is a good thing. Dissatisfied people can change and improve their worlds, make them better, make them different. Another way to ruin a child's love of reading is, of course, to make sure there are no books around. And there are no places where children could read them. I'm lucky. When I was growing up, I had a great local library. Libraries are freedom. Freedom to read, freedom to communicate. It is education (which does not end the day we leave school or university), it is leisure, it is refuge and it is access to information. I think it all comes down to the nature of information. Information has a price, and the right information is priceless. Throughout human history, we have lived in times of information scarcity. In recent years, we have moved from a lack of information to an oversaturation of it. According to Google's Eric Schmidt, the human race now creates as much information every two days as we did from the beginning of our civilization until 2003. That's something like five exabytes of information per day, if you're a numbers person. Now the task is not to find a rare flower in the desert, but to find a specific plant in the jungle. We need help navigating through this information to find what we really need.

Libraries are places where people come for information. Books are just the tip of the information iceberg, they are there, and librarians can freely and legally provide you with books. More children are borrowing books from libraries than ever before, and they come in a variety of books—paper books, e-books, and audiobooks. But libraries are also, for example, places where people who don't have a computer or Internet access can go online. This is terribly important in times when we are looking for work, sending out resumes, applying for pensions on the Internet. Librarians can help these people navigate the world. Libraries are the gateway to the future. So it is a shame that all over the world we see local authorities seeing library closures as an easy way to save money, not realizing that they are robbing the future to pay for today. They close gates that should be open. Books are a way to communicate with the dead. It is a way to learn from those who are no longer with us. Humanity created itself, developed, and gave birth to a type of knowledge that can be developed rather than constantly memorized. There are tales that are older than many countries, tales that have long outlived the cultures and walls in which they were first told.

If you don't value libraries, then you don't value information, culture or wisdom. You silence the voices of the past and harm the future. We must read aloud to our children. Read to them something that makes them happy. Reading to them stories that we are already tired of. Speak in different voices, interest them and not stop reading just because they themselves have learned to do it. Making reading aloud a moment of togetherness, a time when no one is looking at their phones, when the temptations of the world are put aside. We must use language. Develop, learn what new words mean and how to use them, communicate clearly, say what we mean. We shouldn't try to freeze language, pretend it's a dead thing that needs to be honored. We must use language as a living thing that moves, that carries words, that allows their meanings and pronunciation to change over time.

Writers—especially children's writers—have an obligation to their readers. We must write truthful things, which is especially important when we write stories about people who did not exist, or places we have not been to, to understand that the truth is not what actually happened, but what it tells us. who are we? After all, literature is a true lie, among other things. We must not bore our readers, but make them want to turn the next page. One of the best remedies for reluctant readers is a story they can't put down.

All of us - adults and children, writers and readers - must dream. We have to invent. It's easy to pretend that no one can change anything, that we live in a world where society is huge and the individual is less than nothing, an atom in a wall, a grain in a rice field. But the truth is that individuals change the world again and again, individuals create the future, and they do it by imagining that things could be different.