The next chapter

Most parents try to instil a love of literature in their children. As World Book Day celebrates the written word, John Walsh shows us the key to an eager reader

World Book Day is upon us again. Tomorrow, bookshops and libraries everywhere will have special readings, poetry workshops, coffee mornings and web links with authors, and cope with the invasion of small children dressed as Harry Potter, Gandalf and Alice in Wonderland - all with the aim of getting more children to read more books.

The promotion really will stretch around the globe, mainly by exploiting the internet. JK Rowling will launch the WBD Online Festival tomorrow morning, and will chat about her work to young readers all over the world. She will be joined by Jacqueline Wilson and 11 other children's authors in an unprecedented author-reader interface (as Wilson is used to receiving more than 300 fan-letters a day, it will be nice to see if anyone else gets a look-in).

A glance in the social diary tells us that tomorrow is a busy day. The Crufts dog show is getting under way at the NEC in Birmingham, and the Homebuilding and Renovating Show is starting nearby.

It's tempting to see all these events happening on 4 March as having something in common. For is World Book Day, in essence, anything more than an excuse for a child beauty-competition (as Crufts is for dogs) or for bourgeois self-improvement (like the Homebuilding and Renovating Show)? Is our impulse to persuade our offspring to become more bookish the same as our desire to renovate the conservatory and show off the koi carp?

There are many reasons why we want our children to read, and vanity is one of them. The sight of a child buried in a book is a potent symbol of intelligence, self-reliance, imagination and cultural awareness. And it does no harm to the parents' self-image as inspirational figures. "Look," they cry, "young Henry is tackling The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time! How terribly advanced he is."

On my home turf of Dulwich, there's a sotto voce battle among parents, along the lines of My Child Has Started Reading Adult Books Before Yours. "Jude has always been mad on football, bless her," said a friend's mother the other day, "and now she's 12, Fever Pitch is her favourite book." Frankly, I don't believe it, any more than I believe that Tom, who is 15, is lapping up The Corrections, or that Herbert (16, doing AS-levels) is having a ball with Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain.

We hold some truths to be inviolable: that children should be reading rather than not reading, and that the ingestion of fiction (it's always fiction we press on them) is a moral legacy we owe them. We believe that, without a constant stream of books in their lives, children will succumb to the lure of the TV screen and the computer game, and become leguminous morons.

But it is by no means scientifically proven that non-reading children will end up as losers or philistines, nor that chronic bookworms invariably grow into well-adjusted human beings. Nor is it necessarily true that my son, 12, will one day have to "choose" between his beloved Anthony Horovitz thrillers or his blood-boltered Badge of Honour computer game. He gets stuck into both with the same glee.

But how do we make our children read books? How do we start them off when they're tiny and pre-literate? Most parents will tell you that there's no problem amusing children with picture books. They're brilliant interactive tools, their pages full of tiny details to be pointed out, their texts full of repetition and rhythm.

I have, believe me, put in the hours telling the story of the shocking depredations wrought by Little Rabbit Foo Foo and his one-man crime wave against the goblins. I've recommended the same sequence of books to dozens of new parents - the Where's Spot? books, the wonderful Where's My Teddy? and It's the Bear! by Jez Alborough, Each Peach Pear Plum and Peepo! by Janet and Allan Ahlberg. I've discovered a whole genre of children's books that end with a monster pursuing the reader through the final pages, so that you have to slam the book shut to keep it from getting at you. The look on children's faces as they silently digest the information that a slavering ogre is trapped between the pages of a book is an eloquent testimony to the power of the equation: cunning story + vivid pictures + child's imagination = hysteria.

How, then, do you wean the children off pictures and on to words? How do you get them interested in the joined-up plots, the development of character, the progression of narrative through dialogue? You take it in turns with the children to read passages aloud for each other's entertainment, breaking off before the end of a chapter so that they're tantalised into reading for themselves. Humour is important at this stage - nothing gets a child determined to read for himself or herself as the guarantee of a lot of gags.

So are the recommendations of their small friends. Even eight-year-olds are capable of marking each other's cards about books they've enjoyed, whether they're Jean Ure or Roald Dahl. And the secret is not to interfere, even if what's being confidently recommended is In the Fifth at Malory Towers by Enid Blyton.

The problem time is after 10 or 11, when children no longer respond to their parents' social bullying about how they must spend their time, but before they have developed their taste in reading. This is the age when some children abandon reading for ever, and nothing you or their peer group can say will ever bring them back. They will never know what they're missing by not reading Germinal or Anna Karenina, and their book-reading associates will never be able to convince them that they're missing anything.

Which brings us to money and the distinct whiff of bribery that hangs over World Book Day. We owe the idea of the day to the good people of Catalonia in Spain, who traditionally give their loved ones gifts of books on St George's Day. And the gifting of books is central to the WBD promotion, as £1 book-tokens are distributed to every child in participating schools. The tokens can be exchanged for one of six specially commissioned £1 works by people such as Eoin (Artemis Fowl) Colfer and Michael Morpurgo (the Children's Laureate). Or they can put it towards one of the 12 "Recommended Reads" selected by a panel of children's fiction specialists. A cornucopia indeed.

You don't need to be a psychologist to see that the WBD organisers have rumbled that it's the concept of possession that brings children closer to books. Giving them a book token may not lead to high-fives in the playground, but it appeals to their sense that owning a book, or a series by the same author, or a"mini-library" of, say, science-fiction works, is a signifier of the kind of person they are (or they are becoming).

Finding a book that they enjoy passionately will work a subtle magic on their burgeoning sense of self. If they yell with laughter at Philip Ardagh, they'll revel in the discovery of their own lively sense of humour. If they're moved by David Almond, they'll be impressed by their unguessed-at sensitivity. If they finish a classic, or a "difficult" text, such as Catcher in the Rye or To Kill a Mockingbird, they will congratulate themselves on their own good taste in liking it.

Perhaps the secret of getting children to read (or to keep on reading) is simple. It isn't to tell them the books on which to spend their time and energy. It's to give them the choice of what kind of reader - and therefore what kind of person - they want to be.