What Happens to Us When We Stop Reading?

Do you and your children read books whilst on holiday?

As a child, I remember lying on my bed for hours, completely absorbed in ‘Horseman Riding By’ series (I still love a series) by R.F. Delderfield or ‘Gone with the Wind’ by Margaret Mitchell. Time disappeared. I wasn’t in my bedroom any more, I was immersed in their world. I lived with the characters, worried about them, celebrated with them and mourned them.

At 66 years old it is still one of my favourite experiences. Recently I found it in ‘London Falling’ by Patrick Radden O’Keefe and then in ‘The Correspondent’ by Virginia Evans, winner of this year’s Women’s Prize for Fiction. There is a particular joy in a book you cannot put down, that delight to go to bed early to read or lie for hours on holiday. It asks for your attention, and somehow gives you much more in return.

That made me wonder what happens if we lose the habit of reading altogether.

There is growing evidence that we are.

In the UK, children’s reading for pleasure has fallen to its lowest level since the National Literacy Trust began tracking it in 2005: just one in three children aged 8 to 18 now say they enjoy reading in their free time.¹ Teachers, librarians and publishers have flagged the same pattern in the run-up to the government’s National Year of Reading in 2026: children who find it harder to sustain attention, adults who struggle to finish a book, and many of us who reach for our phones the moment our minds become still.