Five years ago, I opened this website driven by my desire to:
Take off anxiety,
Take off stress,
Take off pressure,
Relax into reading,
Bond through books.
As we enter 2025, my desire to bring families and communities together through shared reading is as strong as ever. I’m still on a quest for clarity of direction. I’m still seeking a future where young and old bond through books, where relationships are strengthened through shared reading, where obstacles to literacy are removed, and where reading becomes irresistible.
I listened with interest to BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme on Christmas Eve. Frank Cottrell-Boyce (Waterstones’ Children’s Laureate 2024 – 2026) was the morning’s guest editor. He used the platform to advocate for children in their first 1000 days of life, demonstrating how bonding through books can build ‘the apparatus of happiness’. Dr Sam Wass provided the science, showing how reading aloud aligns brain oscillations and brings parent and child together in a shared state of calm. Evidence was recorded of the child tuning into the parent’s voice: ‘the electronics of relaxation’:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p0kbsfhw
On Saturday 30th December, I visited my dear friend, John Britton, in Penarth Hospice. I sat by his bedside, held his hand and read a well-loved bible passage aloud to him. Our brains weren’t hooked up to a monitor, and yet the sense of calm togetherness was tangible.
Friends, young and old, we need the life-giving flow of shared reading.
This morning I returned to a blog post, which I reshared in 2020 giving it the simple title ‘Comfort Reading’.
The questions I first wrote in March 2018 seem just as pressing in January 2025:
‘Where are today’s children finding their comfort reading opportunities? Where are they learning the soothing strokes of what will become their well-loved, old favourites? Comfort reading rarely comes from one-off grabs from the shelf (and it’s even less likely to come from strict enforcement of 20 minutes of homework reading, 5 times a week). It’s a slow process of marinating in and returning to, read after read after read. That’s how well-loved, comforting favourites are made.‘
My hope in the days ahead is for the comfort and joy of shared reading to come alive in 2025.
Happy New Year, everyone.
Read with Julia 