Julia Eccleshare

It’s always very difficult thinking back to one’s favourite book as a child because different times were different favourite books, but the book that I remember best that I go back to in times of wanting to have a quiet moment of reflection is a book by Rosemary Sutcliffe called Warrior Scarlet, and why it appealed to me is very hard to say.

It’s about a boy with a withered arm in the Iron Age, who can’t get his place in the tribe because he can’t kill a wolf.

I probably read it once a year even now.

Well, yes, because there is a special thing about reading a book that you loved as a child – it takes you back to that time.

You...typically if you ask people about their favourite book as a child or the book that made them a reader – which I think is another way of looking at it – they can remember a fantastic amount about it.

They can often remember who gave it to them, or who read it to them, or where they read it, or...and I have exactly that experience with that book.

Well, I’m third of four children and – this is a terrible thing to say – I don’t think anybody read to me.

I think I remember listening in on my older sisters being read to. So I was the youngest of three girls, and then I’ve got a younger brother. 

And I very much remember my mother reading the Laura Ingalls Wilder Little House on the Prairie sequence to my brother, and that’s when I heard them, too; I certainly never had them read to me. 

And then my father read me Rumer Godden’s Mouse House, and again, this is a very profound memory, probably because he didn’t actually very often read aloud, so it’s logged in my brain as something that he read to me.

Well, that’s interesting, because if I think back to it, I think, perhaps because I worked in books and my husband didn’t, he seems to have done more of the reading aloud than I did.

He loved reading aloud; he has incredible stamina for it, and he would read for an hour quite happily, I think, at the end of a working day. It was quite a nice thing for him to do.

I think my favourite author at the moment is Philip Pullman.

I think he gave us a classic book in Northern Lights, the first of His Dark Materials trilogy, which opened up to a very wide range of children what imaginative fiction can be at its best, and there’s nothing that Philip has written that isn’t interesting, beautifully crafted, um, surprising, and a story that you reflect on.

He raises so many questions, giving openings for children to think – that’s the best kind of writing as far as I’m concerned.

So if you ask me now of a contemporary writer, he would be the person who I think is the greatest.

One of the extraordinary things about reading that isn’t talked about enough, I think, there’s a lot of...of talk about how children learn to read and all of this, but actually, and what strategy might be best, but actually, what makes a reader, a book, it’s finding the book that you really want to read.

And so that’s the chemistry – that’s the chemical moment, when the child finds something that they really want to read.

Well, I think the biggest inspiration that I would...I mean, I would like to say again – to get back to the idea that it is the right book – but I think there are lots of ways into reading, and one of the things that’s very evident is that, um, good films, far from putting children off reading the book, often take children or teenagers to read the book.

You take a book like The Beach – all right, it wasn’t a book that was written for children, but it was a, you know, it was a great teen novel.

It was a sort of...almost a teen anthem novel and, a lot of teenagers read the book after they’d seen the film.

What I certainly wouldn’t do is make judgements about quality of writing.

One of the weirdest things that happens in children’s books is that as soon as a child finds an author that they love, the parents tend to think it’s not suitable because they think if the child is loving it, it’s too easy, or too trivial, or too whatever.

And Jacqueline Wilson is a very good example of this. She is an author who girls particularly found and loved for years, and it’s taken the parents a very long time to realize that she is a very good author.

And what do you say about someone like J.K. Rowling, who is, you know, not a great literary stylist, but has some really remarkable qualities in her books and will be credited – probably over three more generations – for having made children readers?

I wouldn’t want to say children shouldn’t have read her books because they’re not a great literary quality.

I’m almost entirely a print-book reader – but that’s not out of prejudice, that’s just out of the fact that I get sent all the books, so it’s easy for me to find the book I want to read and pick it up. I read on my iPad sometimes. 

I think we are...ought to, sort of, stop seeing the two in polarity.

I think, you know, everybody is going to read both. I read the newspaper online and I read it in print at the weekends.

I think we are all just going to get very used to reading in different ways.

When television first hit, as it were, everyone said children would stop reading, and the curious thing is that children’s books, and even books for teenagers, are stronger now – much stronger than they were when television – children’s television – first took hold.

Children’s television has slightly dwindled; books have increased. So the book has always been under threat from these other media, but somehow reading survives, so there must be something very important about it, or it would have gone – we would all have taken to seeing things in film, which is a much easier way of accessing the same wonderful stories.

Or, I always think the thing that really threatens reading is listening to music.

I know you can do both, but most people don’t. 

But, you know, even with the explosion of music that children have access to, they still have found time for reading.

Well, I still do read for pleasure, but it’s harder to get back to that magical experience, which I do remember very clearly from childhood.

I do remember that being totally absorbed in the book, but as you get older, it’s just harder to carve out time like that, and there is always something else pressing.

And of course, that’s got more so with...you know, I have a BlackBerry; I look at it all the time, and...I have to stop myself doing that if I’m going to enter this amazing fictional world.

So for me, the place that it really works best is a long train journey, ’cause I don’t have to look at anything.

I can be out of my ordinary life and I can just have that experience of getting completely lost in the story.

But it only really works when the story comes to you, and you have that kind of chemical moment when the story grabs you and you know you’re not going to stop until you’ve got to the end of it, or whatever.

You know, you know you want to read it as long as possible.

So I can still read for pleasure, but I have to find the right book.