Stop What You're Doing and Read This

Blake Morrison encourages a call to arms for people to fall in love with reading again in 2012

It was an inspiring English teacher who first turned Blake Morrison onto reading ("that's always the case isn't it?" he admits). As a teenager, he fell in love with the moderns including Joyce, Lawrence and Eliot and so a life-long relationship with the written word began.

Morrison's career has spanned several books, including poetry, libretti, criticism and journalism and the memoir And When Did you Last See Your Father? which was made into a film starring Colin Firth. He is also a creative writing professor at Goldsmith's College.

 

Yet for a man who has made his career from words, he believes now that the UK is at a "crisis point in culture in relation to books", citing the recent Evening Standard surveys about the country's plummeting literacy rates. He says "we need to be reminded of the pleasures of reading but also how [books] can change your life" – and so has signed up to Vintage publishing's call to arms, Stop What You're Doing and Read This! A collection of 10 essays by writers including Jeanette Winterson, Tim Parks and Zadie Smith, it champions the pleasures of reading against the distractions of the modern world – a sentiment very close to WLTB's heart.

 

Morrison's piece begins with the striking image of a friend building a barrier of books around her bed as a teenager – for her, reading proved to be an escape, while for him it was a revolt against his father in particular, who didn't see it as a "useful practical task", he writes. "For me, reading was a rebellion," he explains. "But that's pretty unusual – I think most people are urged to read and their rebellion perhaps takes the form of not reading! In literary  households… your parents are incredibly enthusiastic about reading and there's always books around to pick up. But equally if you're being force-fed or made to do things sometimes [you] can react against it."........

Stop What You're Doing and Read This
http://www.welovethisbook.com/features/stop-what-youre-doing-and-read