10-07-2025
‘Nose stuck in a book' and other stubborn misconceptions around kids and reading
David Hill responds to the Ministry for Culture and Heritage's decision to deny funding support for New Zealand to be Guest of Honour at the 2027 Bologna Children's Book Fair.
*Names have been changed for privacy reasons.
My Uncle X was a huntin' and fishin' man. Every so often, he'd arrive at our back door, hand my mum a feathered or scaled carcass, say Nah, he wouldn't come in, thanks; had things to do, then drive off to kill something else.
One time, he grew more vocal. I was about eight? 10? sitting at the end of the kitchen, head-deep in Biggles Flies East. Uncle X gazed at me; shook his head. 'Got y'nose stuck in a book again, eh?' Seldom have eight words carried such dismissal, such intimations of time-wasting, futility, and unmanliness.
I never had a reply ready, of course. Nor did I realise that my uncle lives on – in the corridors of power.
The Publishers' Association of New Zealand (PANZ) announced last month that it has withdrawn its commitment to be the 2027 Guest of Honour at the Bologna Children's Book Fair largely due to a lack of committed funding from the Ministry for Culture and Heritage. A summary of the decision was reported over on The Sapling. In that report, PANZ president Graeme Cosslett says: 'This withdrawal is more than a missed business opportunity, it's a loss of cultural presence. It denies our writers, illustrators, and publishers the chance to build global connections, especially in indigenous and bilingual storytelling. Without investment, we risk silencing New Zealand's voice on the world stage.'
Our people in power don't see the world's biggest celebration of kids' books and kids' reading – one long-determined by those who actually know the publishing industry as the most fruitful for developing the sector – as deserving their financial support. The Sapling's report, in summary, shows that New Zealand is lagging in investment in our children's literature compared with other countries of a similar size.
'Children's stories are not luxuries,' wrote UK children's author Katherine Rundell. 'They are fundamental to our culture, to the grownups we become, the society we build.' Dear Ms Rundell, please apply for a government position down here.
I've heard people other than my Uncle worry or disapprove of kids being 'stuck in a book'. The implication is that reading is somehow passive; that physical pastimes – like killing wildlife – are more healthy and beneficial.
Passive? Rubbish. When you're reading, your brain is busy, busy, busy. Studies show that pulse, heart-rate, blood pressure are all affected, in positive ways. Neuroscientists have established that reading or being read to stimulates areas of the brain that no other activity seems to reach. (If you're over a certain age, you may remember a Guinness beer advertisement claiming the same thing.)
Physical pastimes more beneficial? Still rubbish. Kids who read or are read to, meet words. Words empower.
They do so partly in that they bring information. Yes, there's always the accompanying danger of mis- and disinformation; perhaps our Ministry for Culture and Heritage staff were fretting over that? But publishers, bookshops, teachers, parents, plus the built-in bullshit detector that so many young readers possess provide a good series of filters against this.
I don't mean only the information that nonfiction usually provides, though reading Aotearoa books helps to build a national identity, not just through mentions of kiwi and pavlova and Taupo and Twizel, but through stories set in our suburbs or on our marae, with our voices and languages, our issues and aspirations, mistakes and triumphs.
I mean also the information that fiction contains. Read novels, short stories, poems, plays, and you become informed about people. Your imagination is extended; you're taken into the minds of others and deep into your own. Stories develop sympathy, help children learn to interpret, understand, recognise. Look around, in and beyond Aotearoa and tell me those aren't essential skills in the 2020s.
Reading and being read to gives children fresh perspectives, makes the world more comprehensible and manageable. ('Life says: 'she did this,'' Julian Barnes wrote. 'Stories say: 'she did this because …'') It develops self-reliance, too; helps form an inner core into which you can retire. E M Forster spoke of 'the measureless content' he felt whenever he began a Jane Austen novel. All readers know the stimulation, even transfiguration that a story can bring. Undoubtedly the MCH committee that decided against supporting our children's publishers, writers and illustrators took this into account when making their decision.
I believe books offer such benefits more than TV or social media do. OK, television for children includes quality programmes. But even on the best TV, images and associations are pre-determined; the programme defines and therefore limits. Reading is far more interactive. Margaret Mahy got it dead right: 'The reader completes the book.'
Then there's the silence and the depth that reading brings. When kids are reading, the world around them steps away: they become enveloped in quiet; go deep down into stillness and thought. In an age of visual and auditory distraction, that internal silence is such a precious experience.
It's also an experience that develops a young reader's inner resources. As I said above, children who read develop skills of imagination and empathy. They experience nuances of feeling and behaviour, and by association, they can understand more of themselves.
And they're never alone. We've all known that heart-filling, potentially transformative process of making friends with characters in the books we read; of wanting to be with – to be – Joy Cowley's Jonasi, Stacy Gregg's Titch, the wonderful Maurice Gee's Rachel and Theo. They're companions for life. I'm sure the splendid folk at MCH would want our young people to grow up surrounded by the very best of friends?
A couple of tedious anecdotes. I've written elsewhere of the 20-something All Blacks supporter being interviewed some years back after New Zealand was yet again knocked out of the Rugby World Cup. He was almost in tears as the TV journalist asked that classically clunky question 'How do you feel?'
'Oh, mate,' the young sufferer replied. 'Words can't express how I feel, mate.' Well (mate), I remember thinking at the time, if you'd been encouraged to read more when you were a kid, you'd have more words to express those feelings, and to handle them better.
'Young David can talk his way out of anything,' my Uncle X grunted to Mum once. (I'm just realising what a literary debt I owe to the fellow.) He didn't mean it as a compliment, of course. But it was – partly – true, and the words, situations, and escapes I encountered in books helped me.
I'll finish with Tyrone*.
I met Tyrone in the distant decades when I was a high school teacher, and he was in my Form 5 / Year 11 / Level 1 NCEA / whatever label you prefer, English class.
Tyrone was barely literate; I suspect he hadn't managed to read a book in his whole life. He was almost totally incapable of handling the simplest school project. In class, he swore at kids who offended him; swore at me as well; kicked desks and chairs over on really bad days. If he was rebuked, he was incapable of expressing or explaining himself, so he became frustrated, then aggressive, then violent. The school didn't want to suspend or expel him – his stepfather had already knocked out a couple of his teeth when he was suspended the previous year.
For a week, I'd been reading a book to Form 5. It was Barry Hines' A Kestrel for a Knave (made into the film called Kes), with its yearning, hope-filled scenes with the lost, feral boy (yes, the parallel is obvious) from Northern England's slums, who tames and befriends a small hawk, till some form of happiness glints precariously on the horizon.
On the day I'll always remember, I'd been reading to them for maybe 10–12 minutes, when I became aware that Tyrone was strangely silent. There were no desk-kickings, no ostentatious yawnings or sneerings. As I turned the page, I snuck a glance at him. He was sitting absolutely still, listening and sucking his thumb.
I don't want to sentimentalise the episode, or romanticise Tyrone's own subsequent life. It was a course of violence, addiction, crime, prison (as happens to so many boys and men without words).
Our government has just come up with the slogan: ' Kids in sport stay out of court '. Fair enough; so how about 'Kids who read books don't become crooks'?
Certainly, my glimpse of that lost boy, briefly held and comforted by words and imagination isn't going to leave me. And just think: if a book set in a society half the planet away could have that effect, what might an Aotearoa story with such hope and friendship in it have done for Tyrone?
So how dare – how dare – any government department or body imply by their actions (or lack of them in the case of the Bologna Children's Book Fair) that our children's books and our children who read them are anything less than vital to Aotearoa's future?
