Why children have stopped reading

It’s only when you read the old stories again, to a child maybe, that you become aware of the extent to which the characters still live inside your mind, bobbing about just below the level of consciousness. I still find myself puzzling over the stories collected by the Brothers Grimm, decades after I first read them. How could Little Red Riding Hood have avoided being eaten? (We read the original, merciless version.) What should Hansel and Gretel have done?

Any good book leaves its mark, but the characters from the books you loved as a child embed themselves. They inform the way you think as an adult, which is why it’s so sad and so significant that children all over the West have stopped reading.

On the next three pages of this week’s Spectator, our writers reveal which characters from their childhood books still haunt them. Rod Liddle’s head is full of imaginary rabbits; Rory Sutherland admires Dr Seuss’s anarchic Cat in the Hat. Lionel Shriver identifies with Pippi Longstocking: ‘I always identified with characters in storybooks who don’t do as they’re told.’ This is true of most of our writers – Richmal Compton’s William Brown pops up so regularly in our poll that I now think of him as the guiding spirit of The Spectator, and I’m proud that he is.

Meanwhile, this summer’s ‘What Kids Are Reading’ report, a study of more than 1.2 million pupils across Britain, shows a 4.4 per cent decrease in the number of books children are reading compared with last year. A survey of UK teachers reveals that they would describe a third of their pupils as ‘weak readers’ who struggle to keep up with the curriculum. (And the curriculum really isn’t hard to keep up with.)