Throughout April, anyone can submit a line to the poem which starts with the lines ‘Tell me what you’re thinking, tell me what you miss/Tell me what you’re dreaming, tell me what you wish’. The result will be a poem that represents and unites a diverse global literary community, speaking for children across the world who want to belong to the world of words and reading.

To add a line to the poem, visit the LitWorld website - and go here to read the poem so far.

When I first heard about The Reader Organisation, and their bold strapline (“Bringing about a Reading Revolution”), I confess that I took the credo with a fistful-sized pinch of salt. In a world where everything from pet shampoos to multi-coloured sugar water vaunts itself as “revolutionary”, I presumed that this was just another bit of neat marketing speak: congenial intentions dressed up in costumes of the avante-garde.

But I decided to give the revolution a spin anyway and started attending a Get Into Reading group. Only then did I began to get it. By this I mean that I began to understand that the word “revolutionary” was being used with absolute legitimacy. It was the perfect trade description. In fact there was really no other word to describe what was going on in this group when we sat down to read together. It was, is, a revolution. Not just in the Marxist sense of historically necessary transitions from one social system to the next, but more so in the ancient roots of that word: the Old French revolution with its associations of rotating celestial bodies, and the Latin revolutus – revolving, turning, rolling back.

Rolling back to what? Jane Davis, chanelling Arnold, explicitly states what the revolution is about in her essay (now my Manifesto) The Reading Revolution. It is, she explains, largely about meeting “unmet primal needs”, that “unspeakable desire [for]…knowledge of our buried life”. But also for “connection”: connecting, even for just an hour or two at a deep human level with another creature; connecting from the often lonely space of our booming, buzzing, disconnected minds, and finding through embodied language (facial expressions, gestures, the sound of a voice) kinship, coherence, and communion. I think I get that now, I really do.

Jane Davis’ genius is in recognising that the “knowledge” (some might call it “happiness”) we’re all so frantically seeking does not always come from the more traditional, socially-sanctioned routes of counselling and psychotherapy, especially now that so much of it is IAPT-delivered. Or even from consuming nourishing reading material at home or on the tube. It doesn’t come from Facebook. It doesn’t come from Twitter. But it almost always does come through a me-you connection with another human being. As long as there is some egalitarian, shaping, inviting conduit through which these two human beings can connect. Reading aloud is that revolutionary conduit.

In some way then, the rolling back is also temporal: rolling back to the millions of years in which homo-sapiens sat around fires telling stories, sublimating their pains and pleasures into the “life-saving equipment” of anecdotes, tales and verse. Or in the span of our own personal histories: rolling back regressively to the deep, nurturing narrative cathexis set up between our infant selves and their carers. And if we lost out on some of the attachments and bonds we needed back then, maybe this revolution is about seeking them out now.

So in the very fullness of this revolutionary recognition, Read Me Something You Love was born. How it works is that I meet with someone and they read aloud with me a piece of literature that they love. As in a Get Into Reading group, we occasionally interrupt the reading with personal responses. I record our discussion, and edit it so as to keep only the content that the reader is happy for others to listen to. I then share this Read-Aloud Love on the internet. No money is exchanged for this service. We are both being “paid” in the doing of the activity. Both benefitting from the unadulterated, flowing pleasure of reading and being read to. For reading done in this way is also about clambering through the literary “scaffolding” (short stories, poems, extracts from novels) that “help us get around our inside space…mapping, exploring and even settling those places where we are still primitive”. Apart from my podcasts RMSYL also happens on a monthly basis with Megg Hewlett for our Short Story Book Club, which uses the Reader model.

If you’d like to do some mapping, exploring and settling through reading something that you love, please do get in touch. Details can be found here.

Until then: vive la (reading) révolution!

Steve Wasserman  is a psychotherapist and mindfulness trainer living in London. He can be found on Twitter via @ShortStoryBkClb and @Mindful_Matters .

Our Read went down to the Just So Festival in Staffordshire last Friday to share the magic of The Unforgotten Coat.  The Just So Festival kindly invited the project to come along and run shared read aloud sessions throughout the day, and they even gave us some free tickets so we could bring two of the young people we work with to the festival. Jessica and Tina had a lovely day exploring the festival site and all it had to offer - they made clay faces, origami penguins, played in the Just So Festival beach, watched live music, and helped us spread the reading revolution by taking part in our group reading sessions and giving out copies of The Unforgotten Coat to people around the site.

The Yurt that we were going to run the reading sessions in was unfortunately out of action…

However it didn’t dampen our spirits, and the glorious sunshine and woodlands made a perfect setting to read in. 

We were hoping that we would see some exciting wildlife in the woods, and we did see a rabbit during one of our walks around the site, but our main wildlife experience was an unusual amount of wasps which enjoyed dive-bombing me… I think my reaction of running away as fast as my legs would carry me kept lots of people entertained.

We all had a really lovely day, and met lots of people who enjoyed sharing the book with us and hearing more about the project - hopefully Our Read will be invited back again next year!

Now new research has indicated that a growing number of boys are ‘reluctant readers’, rapidly losing passion for reading, being put off by the classics of English literature and finding that the longer a book is, the more unappealing it becomes. The publishers Pearson carried out a study in secondary schools across the UK which has found that on a national level, 60% of all reluctant readers are boys. Out of 500 teachers surveyed, 57% expressed concern about the high number of boys who were reluctant to read in classes.

An especially important finding in the research was pinpointing exactly where it is in reading a book that boys begin to lose interest; overall, 70% of teachers have noticed that the attention span of boys had diminished drasticallyon average by the 100th page of a book. However, nearly a quarter of teachers report that engagement with a book can be lost for boys as soon as within the first few pages – and such dramatic disengagement amongst boys is felt most accurately in the North West. It was also pointed out that longer books – over 200 pages in length – are a particular stumbling block; three in ten teachers noted that boys switched off before even starting a book of such length, whereas only 3% stated that this was the case with girls, reinforcing the notion of a gender reading gap.

Further to research amongst teachers, over 260 boys aged between 11-13 also took part in the study. One in five said they thought that reading was primarily ‘for girls’, with the same number saying they prefer to read shorter books – of fewer than 100 pages. Yet, there are glimmers of hope amongst the worrying figures. Despite a signifcant erosion of engagement in reading, more than four in ten boys questioned said their ideal book would be longer than 200 pages – contradicting what their teachers said – and nearly half said they preferred reading books in full rather than just reading extracts. Such findings show that the spark of interest for reading is still there for boys, encouragingly; it is just a question of kindling that spark to grow larger.

In the hope of doing so, a series of completely new and original books designed especially for boys of the age range surveyed has been launched. HEROES has been put together with the assistance of Our Read author Frank Cottrell Boyce and the books in the series have been created with the aim of switching boys back on to reading, increasing their engagement with books as well as building their confidence around reading and improving their literacy skills. In order to help combat the issue of reluctant reading, the books incorporate things that boys identified as those that would make them more interested in reading – action, adventure, crime, horror and thrilling narrative -  as well as being shorter to capture boys’ attention.

Frank hopes that by reading the HEROES books, boys will renew their interest in reading away from school and will gradually begin to read longer stories, saying that boys must be started on shorter books intially if they are to become lifelong readers: “Nobody wants to run a marathon if they can’t run.” As with all readers, the key aspect in switching on boys’ attention is pleasure – and, as Frank says, pleasure can’t be taught: it can only be shared. But the classroom is a good place to start to encourage boys – and girls – to continue their reading adventures elsewhere. “According to Unesco, the biggest single indicator of whether a child is going to thrive at school and in work is whether or not they read for pleasure. Our hope is that the stories in Heroes will be shared and enjoyed in the classroom by pupil and teacher alike because pleasure is the most powerful motivation.”

Hear more from Frank about the HEROES series (and a little bit about his reworking of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang) in this video, broadcast on BBC Breakfast, 17th May 2011:

More information on the study about ‘reluctant readers’ in secondary schools can be read here.

‘Seriously addictive’. ‘Once you’ve started it’s hard to stop’.

The above are slogans that are to be used in the latest campaign for the promotion of reading, though you would be forgiven for thinking otherwise. The initiative, which to begin with will target existing book buyers, has been deemed ‘edgy [...] clever, fun, flexible, memorable’ and ‘a PR catapult’. Such praise of the campaign is hardly surprising, when you consider that it comes from Damian Horner, the man responsible for creating the concept: “Bookaholism”. The project was first initiated by Publisher’s Association CEO Simon Juden and carried through at the Book Industry Conference in order to kick-start the PR stunt and encourage people to buy more books.

Though the campaign will firstly be aimed at those who already purchase books, its creator believes it will also be effective if targeted at those less enthusiastic readers who ‘Quick Reads’ are currently aimed at, with the long term objective being to ‘build (the campaign) into a holistic concept’. Though the overall purpose is obviously to promote books, we’re wondering if it can be right to promote them with the negative associations that inevitably come with addiction. Horner’s slogans of ‘Class A Reading Material’ and ‘Get Hooked on a Book’ certainly make an impact, but is it in the right way? Is this idea of Bookaholism and addiction the only way to inspire and encourage people to pick up a book? Or, as Damian Horner says, will people be just as open to professing themselves ‘Bookaholics’ as they will ‘shopaholics and chocaholics’?

We can only wait and see as to what Horner will be promoting as his ‘Class A Reading Material’…

‘Seriously addictive’. ‘Once you’ve started it’s hard to stop’.

The above are slogans that are to be used in the latest campaign for the promotion of reading, though you would be forgiven for thinking otherwise. The initiative, which to begin with will target existing book buyers, has been deemed ‘edgy [...] clever, fun, flexible, memorable’ and ‘a PR catapult’. Such praise of the campaign is hardly surprising, when you consider that it comes from Damian Horner, the man responsible for creating the concept: “Bookaholism”. The project was first initiated by Publisher’s Association CEO Simon Juden and carried through at the Book Industry Conference in order to kick-start the PR stunt and encourage people to buy more books.

Though the campaign will firstly be aimed at those who already purchase books, its creator believes it will also be effective if targeted at those less enthusiastic readers who ‘Quick Reads’ are currently aimed at, with the long term objective being to ‘build (the campaign) into a holistic concept’. Though the overall purpose is obviously to promote books, we’re wondering if it can be right to promote them with the negative associations that inevitably come with addiction. Horner’s slogans of ‘Class A Reading Material’ and ‘Get Hooked on a Book’ certainly make an impact, but is it in the right way? Is this idea of Bookaholism and addiction the only way to inspire and encourage people to pick up a book? Or, as Damian Horner says, will people be just as open to professing themselves ‘Bookaholics’ as they will ‘shopaholics and chocaholics’?

We can only wait and see as to what Horner will be promoting as his ‘Class A Reading Material’…

I just got out of prison. Parc Prison, near Bridgend, south Wales. A prison for men in the land of my fathers. And I’m thinking in a way that has never been quite so pertinent about The Big Issues: the nature of freedom and confinement and justice and things like that. And education. And in my hand, I’m playing with a rose, an unexpected parting gift. A bright red rose made of bread and glue.

This flower (kind after-thought rather than romantic gesture) was given to me by my guide for the afternoon, Phil Forder, Arts Intervention Manager at Parc Prison. Eager to investigate the possibilities of developing Get Into Reading at Parc, he had invited me over to get a feel for the arts and education programme that he and his colleagues run, as well as for the prison environment itself. It’s a large institution, keeping over 1000 men and boys up on a green hill above a grey town. It reminds me of a big gym, full of echoes, testosterone and tattoos.

Phil takes me to the education department where men improve their English and maths, and to the speckled art rooms where youngsters make paintings and pots to send home to mum. He takes me to the library, where Sian the librarian tells me about her attitude to reading groups, which is wonderfully similar to that of The Reader Organisation‘s.

It’s very relaxed – we always have some tea on the go. We’ve read some great books: White Teeth, Of Mice and Men. They bring out some good stuff. One of the prisoners told us the other day that he loves Classical music. He’d never admit to that on his wing, mind

She is relieved to hear that others with a similar ethos are developing reading groups ‘on the outside’; unsurprisingly, one can feel a bit isolated inside Parc.

‘We have to get Get Into Reading going in here’, I think.

Then Phil takes me to see a cell in B Wing. Young offenders. The air is full of after-shave, the walls tacked with FHM. The curtains incongruously frilly.

‘It’s very small in here,’ I think.

And at the end of the afternoon, Phil hands me the bread rose. ‘A prisoner made it,’ he says. ‘He refused to leave his cell for weeks, didn’t come to classes, but presented a bunch of these to me one day. He’s made it from bread and glue, squeezed it flat and folded it into this. It’s quite beautiful isn’t it?’

It is. And sad. Somehow appallingly sad that from his daily portion, behind a thick door, an invisible inmate fashioned such immaculate fragility. Having hardened myself to what I had expected to encounter at Parc, I had not realised how vulnerable I was to such softness. And yet, from my experience with the revelations that Get Into Reading often inspires, I should have known to expect such human surprises. And I should be happy, not sad, in the thought that there is fertile ground for Get Into Reading in a Parc where bread roses grow.

It’s a question that Kate McDonnell will surely find the answer to, as she and her Wallasey Reading Group embark upon the story of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. Armed with twelve copies kindly provided by Oxford University Press, the novel will take Kate, manager for Get Into Reading, and her group months to complete. Here, Kate talks us through the thinking behind her decision, and we find out what the reaction to Tolstoy has been like so far…

Whenever I present a page of  four ‘books ‘n’ blurbs’ to the members of the Friday afternoon Get Into Reading group at Wallasey Central Library to help us choose what we’ll read next, somebody always says, ‘Can’t we read them all?’

This time they’ve gone for our biggest read yet: Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, which fought off fierce opposition from Dombey and Son.

Oxford University Press, when they heard, kindly donated a lovely set of twelve books, and we’ve had them stacked up on the table at the beginning of the session in a giant and impressive tower!

Yes, it IS long – more than 800 pages, in fact – and it will probably take us about 9 months to read aloud, page by page, from cover to cover. Then there are the polysyllabic Russian names to get your tongue round, and sections on Russian farming to puzzle over, but we’re all hugely looking forward to it.

Two weeks in (we read 13 pages in Week One, 19 in Week Two), initial reactions bode well:

I thought something by Tolstoy would be really dense, but it’s really easy to read.

I’ve never read anything like it – the way he puts the characters over, you can get to know them really well.

Just reading these first few pages – it really draws you in.

Group members have varying degrees of reading experience and no one (apart from me!) has read it before, but already we’re getting comfortable thinking about the characters: Oblonsky – how come we still seem to like him despite the fact that he’s just cheated on his wife? Why is he always ‘expanding his chest’? (‘Because he’s breathing life in?’ as someone suggested).

The first week’s reading ended with a bit of a domestic between him and his betrayed wife, Dolly, territory we could recognise only too well, and we finished the session with a poem called ‘The Quarrel’ by Conrad Aiken, in which a row between a couple unaccountably melts away when they hear music drift in from next door:

….and in the instant

The shadow had gone, our quarrel became absurd;

And we rose, to the angelic voices of the music,

And I touched your hand, and we kissed, without a word.

There were resonances between the texts, comments on how ‘surface’ Dolly and Oblonsky seem in comparison with these lovers who connect in a space beyond words.

Week Two brought more thoughts of love, as well as a passage which I thought could be tricky. We met Levin for the first time: ‘He’s very brittle, isn’t he?’ suggested one reader.

I wondered what people would make of Chapter 7, in which Levin calls on his brother, Koznyshev, and ends up being drawn into a discussion he’s having with a professor about ‘whether a definite line exists between psychological and physiological phenomena in human activity’. Most readers confessed to feeling a bit lost during their argument and were glad when Levin asked a clear question which cut to the chase. ‘They’re just showing off really, aren’t they?’ someone said and recognized the professor’s, ‘We have not the data…’ as a fob off.

I think I speak for all when I say that we found Chapter 9, in which Levin tracks Kitty down at the skating rink, both funny and touching. He loves her and is terrified to tell her in case it spoils everything, but at the same time he reads meaning into her every word and gesture. Some of us remembered feeling like this ourselves!

‘Yes,’ he thought, ‘this is life – this is joy! She said, “Together: let us skate together”! Shall I tell her now? But that’s just why I’m afraid of speaking. Now I am happy, if only in my hopes – but then? …But I must…I must…I must…! Away with this weakness!’

We discussed deliberately persisting in a state of ignorance in order to prolong hope and were helped in this by reading William Meredith’s poem ‘The Illiterate’, at the end of the session:

Touching your goodness, I am like a man

Who turns a letter over in his hand

And you might think this was because the hand

Was unfamiliar but, truth is, the man

Has never had a letter from anyone;

And now he is both afraid of what it means

And ashamed because he has no other means

To find out what it says than to ask someone.

His uncle could have left the farm to him,

Or his parents died before he sent them word,

Or the dark girl changed and want him for beloved.

Afraid and letter-proud, he keeps it with him.

What would you call his feeling for the words

That keep him rich and orphaned and beloved?

What, indeed. As well as illuminating Levin’s difficulty in reading the signs – in wanting to know how Kitty feels about him, but not wanting to know at the same time – the poem also triggered talk about literal illiteracy, with one reader, who works as a support worker for people with learning disabilities, telling of how ‘letter-proud’ the folk he cares for can be, preserving football coupons as cherished objects because they have writing on them and someone else spoke of the moment before opening an important letter when so many outcomes are possible.

I’m hoping that other people in the group will join in writing the occasional AK blog which we’ll post as we progress, but, in the meantime, it’s still a great opening sentence…

All happy families resemble one another, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

…and now don’t you just want to read on?