Life without books

Dina Rabinovitch takes on the "anti-readers", with a brief overview of the kidlit scene in the UK, a sprinkling of smart reviews, and a few hints to parents about how to engage kids with books and authors:

It is one of the many mini-miracles of the great flourishing of children's writing that children's literature should be so strong in a country where the anti-readers hold sway ... The groundswell in children's literature has been child-led; it's been playground word-of-mouth success first, with the adult critics running along behind.

The anti-readers, she says, are "the people - many are parents, some are teachers or classroom assistants - who simply do not know what it is to read, to handle books for the pleasure of their feel, to savour words, stories and pictures with no endgame in sight at all."
I just can’t imagine what that’s like, but it sounds terribly bleak.