Stop what you're doing!

Books about reading don't always work, but when they do, it's like stepping into the company of friends who love books as much as you do.



Stop what you're doing and read this! contains ten essays about the experience of reading by writers like Blake Morrison, Michael Rosen, Zadie Smith and Jeanette Winterson. It was put together in response to research that that came up with depressing findings such as that one in three teenagers in Britain reads only two books a year (or fewer!)

Here are two gems of quotations:

"Select the right words and put them in the right order and you can run a cable into the hearts of strangers." (Mark Haddon, who wrote The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time)

And there is another quotation from Virginia Woolf, which is referred to in a review of this book but I can't find in the book itself, so I had to Google it and here it is:

"When the Day of Judgment dawns and people, great and small, come marching in to receive their heavenly rewards, the Almighty will gaze upon the mere bookworms and say to Peter, 'Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them. They have loved reading.'"