It's official: libraries' work to encourage less confident adult readers is creating new book buyers too. Sponsored by Costa, the Six Book Challenge is now in its second year and attracting thousands of participants in colleges, community education, workplaces and prisons, many of whom are thrilled to complete one book let alone six. Evaluation of the 2008 Challenge shows that they are also becoming converts to borrowing and buying books. Of those asked before doing the Six Book Challenge, 42% said they used a library to borrow books and only 22.5% said they bought books. Of those surveyed afterwards, 89% expected to use the library more and 60% to buy more books.
But this means there's a growing demand for short appealing books. Untainted by any literary "canon", new readers can be the straightest critics once they have the confidence to realise it's not their fault if they are not enjoying a book.
The Quick Reads have proved a hit, with both sales and library loans topping the million mark since the first titles were launched in 2006. The Reading Agency has included these and titles by smaller publishers such as New Island, Sandstone, Barrington Stoke and Accent in our unique database for emergent readers at www.firstchoicebooks.org.uk. Publishers involved in The Reading Agency's Reading Partners programme have also been suggesting backlist titles that fit our criteria - less than 200 pages, minimum 12 point text, a strong "hook" for fiction and accessible formats for non-fiction. But we need more. We'd love to hear from any publishers and authors who would be interested to work with us to entice adults into reading for the first time. Or from anyone else who has suggestions for titles that make great reads for emerging readers.
Genevieve Clarke is a senior project manager with The Reading Agency.
New Leaf Books, www.newleafbooks.org.uk, publish some beautiful collections of stories/pieces written by adult learners for adult learners. Their 'Voices on the Page' collection contains a wonderful range of authentic, genuine writing by adults and these may chime with adults who are new to reading. The pieces are short and various, so there's something for everyone. Their collections of prison writing, 'Lifelines' and 'Inside Life' are starkly truthful accounts of life's hazards and these powerful stories might also engage an emergent reader.
Recommendation for New Leaf Books
I work for The Reader Organisation, which is a charity dedicated to making great books available to everyone regardless of educational, social and personal background.
As part of our leading social outreach project Get Into Reading, we run weekly reading groups in the widest of settings and the group membership is equally varied. In one of my groups for example I had a GP who was an avidly keen reader, a man who had spent much of his life in and out of prison and moving from hostel to hostel, and a lady who had also spent much of her term in sheltered housing and had left school with no qualifications and moreover without being able to read above the most basic vocabularly. In this same group, because the group facilitator reads everything aloud and makes the book fully accessible to everyone, the lady who could hardly read was able to join in and enjoy Charles Dickens' seminal classic Great Expectations in the same moment as the well read GP. Therefore the question of what texts might encourage adult readers who lack confidence in reading is one which requires a diverse answer and within the framework of GIR it can just as easily include the classics as it can include the latest novel. However, what I would like to draw people's attention to in the present instant are the books currently being produced by New Leaf Books.
I run a reading group in Liverpool at a rehabilitation centre for women at risk of offending. We've read a wide range of books, short stories, and poems at the centre, which have included works by some of the well known classic writers such as Charles Dickens or Anton Chekhov to works of more recent acclaim. We are currently reading Chocolat by Joanne Harris for example. During my time at the centre it came to my attention that some of the women present needed one to one reading sessions. Two of these women came to me with only the most basic elements of literacy. The women were attending some local basic literacy courses but still needed more support - a space where they could enjoy and talk about what they were reading rather than being simply taught it as it were.
As our focus at The Reader Organisation is to develop emotional literacy and to use literature as a vehicle for promoting meaningful conversation, I needed to find materials that were written in such a way that they would be accessible to early beginners but would have enough content in them to promote meaningful conversation and it was while I was searching for such materials that I came across New Leaf Books. These books have been absolutely perfect in building the confidence of these women when approaching reading for the first time. The stories and poems have been written specifically for adults learning to read and the range of topics they cover are broad and diverse and more importantly, identifiable for our readers. They deal with difficult life issues and explore a range of human relationships and emotions. Indeed, it is because of their great variety and courage to address difficult emotions and situations, such as depression and loneliness, hope and desperation, love and jealously, as well as happiness and loss that New leaf Books can be read alongside other kinds of reading material that might be considered as being 'out of reach' for eary adult beginners. I've read Kath Wilcock's 'Leaving Home' from the New Leaf collection, for example, alongside William Ernest Henley's well known poem 'Invictus'. I've read Margaret Taylor's 'My Life With Joe', again from New Leaf, alongside William Wordsworth's 'Written in March' and Robert Burns' 'Red, Red Rose' and I've read New Leaf's 'A Woman on her Own' by Margaret Fulcher alongside Paul Laurence Dunbar's 'Sympathy'. The women may not be able to read all of the words from these poems, but they know that they are reading serious literature which is dealing with serious issues. That these women are able to even read one of the lines from these poems with a degree of confidence and possession - that they can read say 'I know why the caged bird sings' or 'I am the master of my fate' is extremely empowering and one of the reasons that they have been able to do this is because they are trying to read these poems in the knowledge that they have just succeeded in completing one or two of the New leaf books. Their success in reading these accessible books and their subsequently awakened interest in meaningful life situations, thoughts and feelings, all seems to make them prepared to also try something else that would have otherwise remained outside their reach.
New Leaf Books are truly inspirational and I look forward to hearing more from them. They are also one of the few publishers for early adult beginner readers that publish poems, which is so important for many different reasons both in terms of literacy and what's more emotional literacy. Moreover, they publish audio versions of their books following a read aloud model which is so important to early readers who can take the CD away with them and read the book at home with the guiding voice of the audio narrator.
Here's saying many many thanks to New Leaf and if anyone is interested in funding out more please go to their website www.newleafbooks.org.uk.