Let’s see what Apple offers in the video.

The premise is a classroom which comes to life when a flock of tropical birds fly in, swirling around and miraculously not crapping all over the place1. The teacher asks the class to identify the birds. One kid points their iPad camera at the bird and gets an answer immediately. “It’s an Amazona,” she says proudly. “They live in flocks,” says another. “And they’re very loud,” announces a third—perhaps unnecessarily, considering they are flying above their heads at that moment.

The teacher then presents to the class via Apple’s Classroom app, and the class goes into breakout rooms—sorry, I mean splits into groups—and learn about flight via cool gimmicks like observing a 3D plane flying over their desk, and playing around with aerodynamics in realtime (that bit looked interesting I can admit). They work on a Keynote presentation, finally airdropping it to the teacher.

And there it is folks, job done. Kids, educated. ✅

What Apple thinks education is

Judging by the video (and Apple’s education page on their site), they see education as providing the quickest route to information possible. And of course, they do this very well. To discover a bird genus, point and click. Type a prompt and get answers back. The ad doesn’t mention it, but the MacBook Neo has native AI, meaning you can click a button and have your writing rewritten, instantly. You can create a beautiful presentation, whether or not you have any artistic or design inclination. And you can send the presentation straight to the teacher, definitely not naming the file mrs_thompson_has_hairy_legs.pdf or anything like that. Because kids don’t do that sort of thing.

Apple thinks EdTech is successful when it minimises the friction of learning2. Get to the answer quicker, produce the presentation more easily. This is their business logic entering the classroom. But class is not about roleplaying the office environment.

Friction makes learning stickier

If Apple’s goal is to get to the answer as fast as possible, they may be succeeding. As with ChatGPT and others (and Google before that3) the data suggests that most of us are impatient for answers now, as soon as the thought occurs to us4. The idea of sitting in ignorance when we have the option to discover immediately seems alien.

But in education, there’s a key difference. The answer is only part of the equation. Learning out how we get to the answer is the purpose of education, is it not? It’s more than knowledge. It’s understanding.

Any schlemiel5 can look up an answer on the internet. But as soon as you need to go deeper, the answer will not be enough.

Consider coding. There’s a site that all developers know called Stack Overflow, where coders post problems online for other coders to help resolve. It’s a magnificent resource. But the clear and present danger is that you take the answer, copy and paste it into your project, moving on without gaining any further understanding of the problem and solution. Not to mention, you’ve just put someone’s code into your project without knowing what it does. Bad form.

Or think of those astronauts on Apollo 13, the moon landing trip that went wrong when the electrical and life-support system went offline. Their understanding and knowledge of engineering, science, physics, electronics, maths, etc., was so advanced that they were able to cobble together new components to fix their craft in the vacuum of space to get safely home.

Or what about a surgeon who, while operating, discovers something unexpected and has to act quickly in a life-or-death scenario. There’s no time for looking up answers - this is where deep, earned knowledge and understanding is deployed in realtime.

The 90s experience

In the Matrix (1998), the fake digital world that is fed directly into the brains of the majority of humans displays the world as it stood in the 1990s—which is accepted as the “pinnacle” of human civilisation. I’m beginning to think the machines were right.

I’ve lamented before about how kids today have missed out on the 90s experience of building (and breaking) computers:

Apple has taken this approach to the extreme with hard-soldiered components and parts. Stable, well-made, but unexciting. It works! But we can no longer have any hardware fun, which I think is a shame.

The EdTech arms race

The EdTech guys are smart. They are managing to sell devices via schools to millions of children. They are using technology to make education more entertaining, quicker, more beautiful. But are they actually helping kids learn?

Rather than using tech to increase screen time, my philosophy is that technology should be used, in a limited capacity, to help motivate kids towards offline learning—reading books, drawing, writing equations out by hand. You know, the boring stuff that has worked so far.

Apple builds amazing products that make everything easier. But if everything is easy, what do we learn?

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Bonus: Tone-deaf tech

Considering the growing anti-screen sentiment, this particular pitch on the MacBook Neo page seems especially tone-deaf. A screen-based device pitched as “your constant companion”.

2

More cynically, Apple also thinks EdTech is successful when they achieve “1:1 device deployment”, AKA selling to millions of children worldwide via their schools:

I began learning the piano at a relatively young age. I have memories of hot summer evenings sat on the piano bench in itchy school shorts, fidgeting as my elderly teacher1 instructed me to play a passage or set of scales again, again, AGAIN, until I got it right.

I probably bugged him with my fidgeting (I still fidget to this day, but now it mainly annoys my wife instead). But, looking back as an adult, I also had every right to be irritable. Because as I was trying to learn the very basics of scales, chords, melody and—in particular—rhythm, I had to contest with my teacher’s clock.

Imagine being asked to play in time, counting a silent 1 … 2 … 3 … 4 … in your head. You screw up your face and stick out your tongue in concentration because another repetitive rhythm is relentlessly trying to trip you up. The clock, the likes of which I haven’t seen since (because seriously, why would you own one) contained a series of glass tubes and metal marbles, like oversized ball bearings. Every minute or possibly thirty seconds, a marble would drop out of position, and roll, roll, ROLL its way down the glass tube, landing—clunk—among the other marbles. Presumably, some clever mechanism brought the marbles back up to the top, as the cycle continued endlessly. Every lesson, the clock ticked, the marbles dropped, the balls clunked.

If I do ever see one of these clocks again, I will likely go into an involuntary rage like Captain Hook, smashing the clock into tiny pieces.

For some reason I can’t quite fathom, I came to dread these lessons2. Eventually, I must have complained consistently enough as my parents allowed me to swap piano lessons for the significantly more infuriating instrument (for neighbours, family, and pets alike) — the trumpet. At this age, around eight or nine years old, I hated practicing. It seemed such a frustratingly futile waste of time, especially when I could have been outside playing football. At this early stage in the instrument, everything was new, everything was difficult. At least on the piano, beginners can make a half-decent sound. But on the trumpet… it takes years to get a really decent sound. And even when the sound finally becomes palatable, the practice includes plenty of strange sounds in the guise of ‘slurs’, ‘tonguing’, and ‘pedals’, which can sound a bit like a radiator having a mental breakdown3.

Confessional side note

To illustrate just how frustrating I found music practice - I once had such a fit of anger when practicing (and screwing up) my scales that I slammed the trumpet into the ground, bending the bell back like a crumpled flower. I can only apologise to my parents (hopefully I did at the time).

I used to hate music practice; until I didn’t.

There was a point when practice slowly turned from a chore into something I enjoyed, and then close to an obsession. The different facets of musicality started to come together, when I was suddenly able to play a scale or piece of music I had battled with for weeks. The satisfaction of progress became more and more apparent. I started in the school band, and found the joy of playing with others too.

Becoming ‘fluent’ in a musical instrument is like becoming conversational in a new language: very satisfying, but also practical. It unlocks conversations and friendships that were previously unavailable.

(If you saw this sledgehammer of a segue coming… well done!)

Reading is similar to learning an instrument. It can be infuriating at the start: slow, tedious, and the stories (or tunes) can be pretty basic. You want to get to the good stuff, but you aren’t ready for it yet4. So you plod, plod along, occasionally experiencing surges in technique or understanding. As you advance, and as you practice, reading becomes more fluent. Words take on greater meaning and sentences become more accessible. Rather than decoding each word intellectually, each word starts to contain feeling, shape, colour, emotion, that is accessed without thought. A single word begins to express a whole world of ideas.

Reading takes time to get to this stage. Years! And while it does become inherently enjoyable at some point, many children—far too many—do not reach this point. Like the millions of children who learn a musical instrument but hang it up before their level of skill catches up with their expectation for what they should sound like.

Readers and musicians alike need a lot of encouragement, especially early on. They need to understand that, yes, it can be enormously frustrating. It can be hard. It can be mentally tiring. It can be slow and tedious and require reading and re-reading over and again until it makes sense.

But all worthwhile things in this world come on the other side of graft. Satisfaction tastes sweetest when it is earned. You cannot shortcut your way to becoming a musician, CEO, reader, plumber, or mathematician. There may be more efficient routes to the summit, but everyone still has to work their way up somehow.

And those who quit never get to enjoy the view.

Thank you for reading. If you enjoyed this post, please consider sharing online or with friends, commenting, or clicking that lil’ heart button!

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At its best, long-term investing performs a kind of civic miracle. When people invest their savings—over decades, not days—the capital markets put that money to work, financing companies, infrastructure, and jobs. And when that cycle happens in your own country, your future and your nation’s future become linked. You help finance its growth. It helps finance yours.

Later on in the letter he comments, inevitably, on AI. Again, he’s broadly optimistic:

AI will create significant economic value. Ensuring that participation in that growth expands alongside it is both the challenge and the opportunity.

Challenge and opportunity. Throughout my career1, it’s clear that the times when I faced challenges (mergers, short on staff, new strategies, restructuring) there is usually an opportunity waiting somewhere in the wings.

If you’re raising children, you have my permission to be concerned about the future they are facing. Even if you’re an optimist (like Larry and me) the potential challenges of this Brave New World are many. Life may look quite different in just five or ten years time, so how can a parent use long-term thinking or an investment mindset to prepare their children for the unknown?

I’m glad you asked.

Reading = investing

This Substack is called The Reading Edge for a reason: I believe a love of reading is the single most beneficial learning tool that we can give a child.

The parallels between reading and long-term financial investment are numerous:

1. The earlier you start, the better (the benefits compound over time)

2. Both require patience (long-term horizons)

3. Both have a learning curve at the start

4. Choosing well requires research and care (both stock selection and book selection)

5. Consistency is key to long-term growth (you have to ignore the world and keep investing whether the markets are up or down).

Here’s the world famous investor, Warren Buffet, conveniently backing me up:

If you are investing in your education and you are learning, you should do that as early as you possibly can, because then it will have time to compound over the longest period.

And that the things you do learn and invest in should be knowledge that is cumulative, so that the knowledge builds on itself.

So instead of learning something that might become obsolete tomorrow, like some particular type of software (that no one even uses two years later), choose things that will make you smarter in 10 or 20 years.

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Great points, Wazzy B! And while he’s writing about education and learning in general, reading specifically is the ultimate tool in the box for building knowledge.

If there’s one single way to give your kids the ability to learn for themselves in future, then invest in reading. It’s the slow, plodding, daily grind that becomes more rewarding over time. It’s the key to unlocking spheres of expert knowledge — whatever they become interested in later in life.

Reading won’t become obsolete in the new world. In fact, the children who grow up to love reading will have an unfair advantage: they will have access to the best toolset for learning, thinking, and adapting in increasingly uncertain times.

And similar to Larry Fink’s symbiotic benefits of investing (for people and nation) we can also say that raising readers will become beneficial on a wider scale. These readers will be the next generation of thinkers: scientists, politicians, lawmakers, writers, theologians, journalists, ethicists… the list goes on.

So whatever happens next—whether it’s an upmarket or downmarket—investing consistently will help us to ride the wave.

I had just emerged from a dream about the book I was reading, Golden Hill by Francis Spufford. A strange, nostalgic feeling accompanied this realisation — it’s been a long time since dreamt about the contents of a book.

My wife and I were in the middle of a 3-day digital detox retreat. This is a fancy (and quite expensive) way of turning off your phone. But it’s the second one we’ve done in the last couple of years, and I think I enjoyed this one even more than last time!

The trip was instigated by my wife, whose busy city job has been even busier and cityish than usual, and was feeling the need to come up for air. We booked a cabin in the woods, just an hour’s drive from London, through Unplugged.

The idea is to take a mini-break with no screens. You lock your phone away, and try to remember (if you ever knew) what life was like before the internet. We went on a couple of decent walks (about 10k each at a gentle amble) and visited a local brewery, yum.2 We took photos (a polaroid camera is provided), drank Moth cocktails (a revelation) and asked each other deep and meaningful questions over the open fire.

Oh, and we read. A lot.

I read much of Golden Hill during our brief stay. I wasn’t rushing. The book is a bit like eating nouvelle cuisine; you want to savour every moment. I found that by unplugging, I was able to plug in to the book far more deeply, and enjoy it significantly more than I have in some time.

Often when I’m reading at home, I feel nudged by the promise of an email or WhatsApp message.3 Instead, my mind was filled with sunshine, a great book, stimulating conversation, and a little wine.4 I slept as soundly as I have in years (not having Vauxhall Bridge Road ten meters away from my head) and dreamt of eighteenth-century Manhattan.

It’s a strange thing to vividly dream about something you’ve read. In London, my mind is so visually stimulated every day that I generally dream about stuff I’ve seen. But when all that’s around you is woodland, dreams draw on another set of visual imagery — your imagination.

When was the last time you dreamt about a book you’ve been reading?

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Graham

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The first draft is never wasted.

Even if you completely rewrite, overhaul, gut and butcher that draft until nothing recognisable is left, it was still worth doing.

The first draft of a song

Towards the end of 2025, I decided to write a Christmas song. The first draft of this song was recorded as a voice note was a bit all over the place. (In fact, in an act of ego-sabotage I’ve put the audio at the bottom of this post).

It’s typically morose (my wife keeps asking me to write in a major key but so far I’ve resisted) but also has some gently vibey Luther Vandross-esque stuff and a couple of tasty chords that I’d just learnt to play on the piano.

I sent the voice note to a few trusted friends and nervously waited for their take on it. This is always the worst part; waiting to see what others think. And it’s one of the keys to the first draft - having something to get feedback on. You may be able to ‘sell’ an idea to friends and family, but until it’s on paper, it’s just an idea.

** Quick sidebar: in hindsight, it was a mistake to write a Christmas song in November. Here in the UK at least, Christmas songs are playing on the radio well before autumn has laid down it’s last pumpkin-spiced latte. Any pro will tell you it’s way too close to release time, but, at least by the end of this post you’ll be aware that I’m anything but a pro. **

The feedback came through, and was (mostly) pretty positive. Hallelujah! But I sat down with my buddy Pete Mills (a super talented musical man gifted with both creativity and clear-thinking, which makes him a very useful person to bring onto any project) and we thrashed through the first draft over beers. We chipped away here and there, cutting a bunch of stuff (including the Luther Vandross bridge, sob), tightened it up, added some even tastier chords, and at the end of the evening I got Pete to play a version of the track to a click on my keyboard. He did it in one take, of course.

(This was perhaps a lil’ cheeky, like when MJ got Eddie Van Halen to solo over ‘Beat It’ and then never credited/paid him. A bit like that.)2

From Pete’s piano track, I recorded vocals with Zoë (the studio was in a railway arch, so I had to re-record those later too, d’oh)3 and then drums with Riley in another studio in North West London. Eventually, I mixed it all and got it out about ten days before Christmas.

Get to the point, man: the first draft, even if it’s embarrassing and mortifying to listen back to, is at least something tangible that has value. It’s something to build on, change, adjust, or tweak. Without it, you just have an idea. And ideas are cheap.

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The first draft of a book

Last week I took a trip to a cottage in Suffolk to spend the week working on the Storygram book.

(Storygram is a project I’m running to help parents with curated resources, ideas, strategies and research to motivate their kids to read. I’ve been working towards a book that gives a bunch of actionable ideas for busy parents to try).

Fresh notebook in hand,4 ink cartridge replaced (I write drafts by hand like I’m Tolkien or something — I am just missing a pipe) I proceeded to plow through the first section of the book, which contains the most actionable stuff.5

I wrote 9 chapters in a week, clocking in at around 50k words. This is, by far, the most writing I’ve ever done in one go.

Sugar my puffs, that’s a lot of words. Check it off the list, job done, right?

Not so fast.

Throughout the week, as I added to my frankly heroic word count, a creeping thought was dawning, like a red sky in the morning6. I was increasingly concerned that what I was writing would seem preachy and advisory. It was beginning to read like I was some kind of parenting guru offering infallible know-how.

If you know me at all, you’ll know that my know-how is actually quite fallible.

Storygram was never intended to appear as me being the one with all the answers, but rather to utilise my interests and passions (reading and writing in this case) and even more importantly the time I have available to explore something that tired and busy parents may well not have the time to delve into.

Why press on for 9 chapters and 50,000 words if I thought my approach was wrong? That’s the crux of this post — I could have restarted, strategised, spent the week rethinking my approach. But I wanted to get all my writing down and then wrangle with it. While it’s all in my head, the wrangling is impossible, like lassoing a cloud.

Through the process of this first draft, I made a few important discoveries:

1. My tone and approach is critical. I am curating and presenting ideas rather than issuing authoritative tracts, and need to ensure I don’t veer into preaching.

2. I want the book to have variety in its presentation - narrative, dialogue, interviews, research. Rather than a direct author to reader self-help download, I want to share what other parents have tried, what’s worked and what hasn’t.

3. I believe I have an opportunity to produce a variety of online and offline materials and resources that will make the actionable ideas more practical for the busy parents I’m trying to help.

None of this detracts from the initial draft, but instead builds upon it. I can rethink the style of my communication, and will be looking to flesh out what I’ve written with stories, parent experiences, and research to make the book far more engaging.

No creative work comes out fully formed

The first draft is the foundation that any creative work is built upon. It may not be obviously present to anyone else, but it is right there, deep in the roots.

A statue starts life as a literal lump of rock. Over time, this block is chipped, cut, carved away at with increasing finesse until it takes its full shape. A block of marble is nice enough, but people will travel around the world to look at Michelangelo’s David.

Here’s my encouragement: press on with your first draft. Whatever your project is, get your first version done. Even if you begin to hate it as you’re making it, that’s okay7. Push past the doubts. They may be correct, but press on.

Because once the first draft is finished, then you can really begin.

Nothing comes out fully formed, perfect. Paradoxically, it’s in the process of making something that we discover what we’re making. And we often discover something of ourselves along the way.

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Bonus for keenos

Thanks for reading all the way to the end… your reward (or punishment?) is to listen to the first draft vs finished article of Beneath the Stars, my Christmas song.

Here’s the voice note:

And here’s the finished article:

Until next time,
Graham

But since I’ve been absent from your inbox for two months1, I wanted to lay out what 2026 looks like for this Substack.

First though, a quick reminder of the why:

I’m based in the UK, and the initial number that got me fired up was 34.6% - that’s the number of children in the UK who said they read for pleasure in 20242.

Why does that matter? A variety of reasons, such as:

… all serious intellectual work happens on the page, and we shouldn’t pretend otherwise. If you want to contribute to the world of ideas, if you want to entertain and manipulate complex thoughts, you have to read and write.3

We (those currently raising the next generation) have a responsibility to prepare children for the world they have entered.

That said, Storygram’s remit is mainly finding ways to get kids reading for pleasure. If we inadvertently save the world at the same time, it’s a bonus.

Coming up in 2026

Enough worthiness for one post. Let’s get to the fun stuff… what can you look forward to on the Storygram Substack in 2026?

1. A new book (released in serial) 🤓

I’ve been working on a non-fiction book for about a year (squeezing in time where I can). Here’s the scope:

If you want to help children to grow in knowledge, wisdom, and character, this book will help you understand why reading gives children a unique advantage, how to protect children from distraction, and how to motivate them to enjoy reading.

There are three broad themes:

1. Motivate your children to read (tools and ideas to get kids excited about books)

2. Protect the next generation of thinkers (rethinking our approach to topics including technology, education, and boredom)

3. Learn why reading gives an advantage (knowledge is power)

I’ve settled on this order for now because for those who are most interested in action, part 1 will give them the tools. They can learn about why it is important later, if they wish. My suspicion is that most adults who are reading a book about the importance of children reading, will not primarily need telling why it is important.

I’m not promising a strict release schedule, however I’m aiming to publish at least one chapter per month, possibly divided into multiple posts if they are long.

Access to these chapters will be free for a couple of weeks, but will become paywalled as they enter the archive.

Feedback please!

I’m seeking feedback on these posts — positive or negative. I want to know my blind spots and have my thinking challenged by readers before I put anything to print.

I’m considering calling it something along the lines of: An Unfair Advantage: Raising Tomorrow’s Thinkers. Or possibly: Raising Long-Form Thinkers in a Short-Form World. Reply with your suggestions!

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2. Footnotes (revisited) 🎶

In 2025 I started Friday Footnotes, an attempt to post regular updates without the formality of a long-read. I managed 17 weeks of these until client work took over in December.

I’ll still write Footnotes in 2026, but not every week4. I found that I spent a lot of time working on these posts when really they should be the overflow of my research and other writing. Also, they were getting a bit long, eh?

3. Podcast 🎙️

Oi — don’t roll your eyes!5

Now there’s no promises with this one. As part of the book writing process, I would love to do a pilot series of conversations with parents — looking at their wins and challenges in motivating their own kids to read. More details to come, and only if I have fewer migraines than I have had in the last couple of months.

4. Book recommendations 📚

There was some interest when I posted about the childhood book that stuck with me. I’d like to spend more time digging into the great children’s books (new and old alike), and so am looking to write the occasional book recommendation.

Thank you

Finally, a huge thank you to those who have stuck with my writing in 2025. I hear consistency is the main thing with online writing, so that’s a shame 😉

Looking forward to much more to come this year.

Graham x

PS If you have ideas for the sort of things you’d love me to write about, please drop a comment or send me a message.

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Each week I touch on reading, parenting, motivation, children’s books, education, writers, and whatever else catches my attention. Enjoy!

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As Blaise Pascal apparently wrote:1

“I have made this longer than usual because I have not had time to make it shorter.”

That might mean the whole post doesn’t show in your email — you can just click view entire message to see the whole thing in a browser. Onwards!

(Don’t) Go It Alone

I’ve been rushed off my feet with client work as I try to clear projects and vaguely hit deadlines before the Christmas break2. I don’t necessarily want to be editing videos on Christmas day, but it might not be the first time.

So instead of the usual fare this week I’m reflecting on one big theme (and lesson) I’m taking away from 2025: collaboration.

Stop! Collaborate and listen.

It might seem odd that this forty(one) year-old bloke has only just discovered the value of working with others. But, if I’m honest3, a combination of pride, selfishness, desire for control, fragility, laziness — and an impressive host of other vices — have held me back from all sorts of projects over the years.

I always hated group projects.

I hated the dynamic: usually someone vocal will take charge while the quiet thinkers sit in the corner, rolling their eyes and dropping fatuous remarks. There’s usually at least one coaster, getting a grade for essentially zero work4. There’s also inevitably a disparity in skill between the group. Am I really supposed to give up my ideas for these schmucks?

I know what you’re thinking. This guy has a high impression of himself.

You’re right. I was delicate. I didn’t want to give up my precious ideas, and if I did, I would be amazed that people weren’t falling over themselves at my genius. I would rather lock my ideas away than risk someone else taking them, or offering their feedback. Because I was afraid.

Fear of collaboration

Ideas, are, in fact, cheap. As an ‘ideas guy’, this is quite hard to accept. The fear of giving up your ideas melts away when you realise just how cheap ideas truly are. That when you give them away, the world doesn’t end. It’s not like the Facebook movie (usually). You probably won’t lose a multi-billion dollar empire.

This is where I have to tell you my one and only lesson on collaboration: the more you give away, the more you get back.

Don’t ask me how that works. If I think back to those dreaded group projects at uni or school, I was often the reticent one, judging from afar and not wading in. The others in the group who jumped in with both feet usually had a much better time, and probably lifted the score of the group as a result.

Fingers and pies

This week I watched Hans Zimmer and his merry band of provocatively dressed musicians performing to a packed O2 arena in London5. I’ve been a fan of film soundtracks, and his soundtracks in particular, for a very long time, so it was very special. I got a little emotional at one particular moment in the Gladiator soundtrack. (I do not get emotional, as a rule6).

All the music performed came from Hans Zimmer’s brain, but Hans didn’t really need to be there for it to work. Apart from the intermittent talkie bits between song — where Mr Zimmer told us he prefers to be at home because he knows where the bathroom is, or told a fairly shocked audience that the incredible violin solo had just been played by someone who essentially had a fever — the concert would have carried on just fine without him.

I’m glad he was there. All I’m saying is that he spent most of the evening looking mildly inept trying to get his computer working, while the epic soundscapes belted out all around him.

I went to another gig at the Albert Hall last year, billed John Williams vs Hans Zimmer — neither of whom were there, but I still enjoyed it!

What am I getting at? Rather than spending this year swimming in an icy cold well of self-reliance, I instead decided to do my best to join the open seas of collaboration. I can report that the water is warm, and not nearly as full of sharks as previously suspected.

My year of collaboration

Here are a few quick areas where I collaborated and experienced growth in 2025.

If you’re thinking, isn’t “collaborating” just “being with friends”? well.. you might be right.

Running

Running is an activity I’ve generally viewed as solo. There is a joy to losing yourself in running and feeling the stress of the week fall off your shoulders. Even at Parkrun, I’m not there to chat. I’m there to beat my younger self.

But I’ve really enjoyed running with friends this year. It might not have always been at the pace I was aiming for, or the distance, but somehow those things matter less when you’re with friends. I’m fairly sure I’ve done more running this year thanks to the social element.

Writing

I have a writing group with a few friends — affectionately called Write Here, Write Now (by me at least). We usually meet at a coffee shop (a great chance to tour some of the amazing joints in London). We chat, write a bit, chat a bit more.

It’s not 100% productive. It can be quite expensive (there are some really nice coffee shops). But it is 1000% better than struggling alone at home, wondering if your ideas are any good.

I’ve found the group inspiring in all sorts of ways, from seeing each other come up with great articles or ideas, release their writing for the first time, or discussing some niche topic to a frankly nerdy degree.

Music

I realise these are all quite off-topic for Storygram, but quite on-topic for my life! I’ve just announced my new band, and I’ll be releasing our music on Substack:

I’ve been so encouraged in making music through friendships this year, and For What Joy (the collective name) is probably the clearest product of collaboration for me this year, that wouldn’t have happened otherwise.

Storygram

I’m sure you were wondering if I’d bring any of this back to Storygram. Well, here it is!

At the beginning of the year I started this Substack in earnest, with a flurry of posts exploring why children aren’t reading, and the importance of reading. Through those and subsequent posts I’ve connected with many of you — readers from various backgrounds and countries, but with one common denominator: caring about the next generation.

Through comments, discussions, dinners, meetings and more, my ideas have been shaped, challenged, and grown. And this is constantly informing the work that I’m doing with Storygram.

I’m getting ahead of myself but as we head towards 2026, I’m thankful for friends, encouragement, chats in the park, unnecessarily long runs, studio jams, and business advisors who come in all shapes. I’m grateful that I get the chance to explore all these avenues with people I care about, and I hope that I can encourage others in their fields as much as I’ve been encouraged.

Or alternatively, we could just all go it alone.

That’s all for today. Have a wonderful weekend. Keep learning! 😊

Graham

Each week I touch on reading, parenting, motivation, children’s books, education, writers, and whatever else catches my attention. Enjoy!

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This week’s footnotes 🧐

1. Machine Time

This week I’ve been listening to Dilla Time by Dan Charnas. It’s one of those books that benefits from being listened to over being read, with snippets of music and sound clips throughout. The subject of the book is James “J Dilla” Yancey, a prolific and Grammy-winning music producer who developed a rhythmic style that became widely emulated in hip hop and neo-soul.

The book is part history, part musical critique, part drama. It’s wonderfully written and a fascinating insight into a world of music that I love.1

While he had a very attuned sense of musicality, J Dilla’s story is one wrapped up in the rise of machines and technology. Growing up in Detroit, he lived in a city where the modern industrial revolution hit hard, machines replacing human workers in droves.

He became what could be described as a musical programmer, at one with the new sampling and drum machines that emerged. With these he was able to produce hit songs in minutes.

In the book, Charnas describes the development of machine time — how the emergence of digital recordings began to introduce perfection to timing and, even more interesting to my mind, how digital music feels ‘cold’ compared to warmer, analogue recordings.

Part of the reason for this sensation is that analogue music is continuous. Even when a musician stops playing, there is something happening. There’s air moving in the studio, there’s a breath, a music sheet turning, a pedal being pressed or a head turning. There is never silence.

Contrast that with digital music. The space between notes is silent — and not just what we might think of as silent—no obvious noise—but absolute silence. There is sound, and then there is the absence of sound. This is unnatural.

Digital music is cold and harsh, and requires significant human intervention to make it ‘feel’. Part of J Dilla’s genius was finding and sampling original recordings, full of heart and soul, that he could bring in and manipulate in the digital environment, to bring warmth to the music.

Philosophical Footnote: If synthesised (digital) music is machine language in musical form, where is the ‘silence’ in our current machine technology, particularly AI? It might be less obvious, but deep down, the machine language at its core is made up of zeroes and ones, on and off, noise and silence — is this what we sense when we say something made by artificial intelligence has no soul to it? The void in the machine?

Is the only way to emulate soul in machine-produced works by sampling (ripping off) human works?

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On a related note…

2. When the problem is too big

It’s tempting to despair when looking at some of the problems we face today. The problem of how to motivate children to read is one that, I believe, has serious implications for the health of our society. But it’s too big. Sometimes, when I consider it for too long, it becomes all-consuming and exhausting.

Something I’ve been thinking about (in part inspired by the writings of , amongst others) is about addressing big problems at a local level. Instead of lamenting huge problems, we reduce our field of vision to those around us. Our ‘village’, if you will. That might be your town, or family, or local community.

The internet sometimes presents us with the impression that we can change the world, and yet we ignore the people in our lives who could most actively benefit from what we offer. Sure, it might not be scaleable, but perhaps not everything in life has to fit the silicon (valley) mould.

It sounds a bit like the principle of being trusted with a little before being trusted with a lot2.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m working towards solutions that will hopefully benefit parents and children on a wider scale than my immediate network. But if I’m unable to help implement improvements at the local level, should I even be trying on the wider one yet?

Footnote for thought: who are the children in your circle who would benefit from being read to, and encouraged in, reading? What has worked in your ‘village’ and what has not?

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3. Don’t stop learning!

For adults and children alike: never stop learning!

My friend Zoë told me yesterday that she’s going to learn the flute. She’s already very musically gifted, and this is just another string in her bow, so to speak. One of her friends is a music undergrad, and they will trade flute lessons for warm meals. Seems like a good deal for both parties!

Her enthusiasm and curiosity about learning is something I applaud in all walks of life, and the approach — finding a personal tutor, who in this case happens to be a friend — seems to me one of the best ways to catch their enthusiasm for whatever subject you’re vaguely interested in.

I’ve realised that one of the reasons I enjoy this platform (Substack) so much is that it gives you direct access to the interests, thoughts, and ideas of people, who in a sense become like tutors that we can be inspired by and learn from.

Footnote: who can you learn from in your local circle? Do you have any students or chefs or plumbers or artists or farmers who might inspire you in some area of life you’ve never considered much before?

That’s all for today. Have a wonderful weekend. Keep learning! 😊

Graham

Each week I touch on reading, parenting, motivation, children’s books, education, writers, and whatever else catches my attention. Enjoy!

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This week’s footnotes 🧐

The Habit of Attention

Recently, I was introduced to Charlotte Mason, the brand influencer attached to this episode of Friday Footnotes1. I’m sure many readers are aware of her:

I’ll be honest: reading a book with the title, Habits: The Mother’s Secret to Success, was not how I imagined my life panning out. I’ve never been cool exactly, but this is a new low even for me. Since hitting forty, these things seem somehow to matter more, however.

Also, who doesn’t love finding out a mother’s secret?

Charlotte—ahem, that’s Mistress Mason to you—was a British educator born nearly two-hundred years ago. She believed that carefully developed habits would encourage lasting change (in children and adults). North American private schools and homeschoolers appear to be particularly fond of her ideas.

I have long believed that reading is a habit that leads to enjoyment of reading. Without the habit, it’s unlikely to stick. And so habits are fundamental to my approach with Storygram.

Even at 150 years old, I’ve found Mason’s writing to be clear and helpful.

She likens habits to railway tracks. Essentially, once a habit is developed, a track has been laid down. The action of that habit now run almost effortlessly (and thoughtlessly). Of course, this is equally the case for both good and bad habits, unfortunately.

We are all mere creatures of habit. We think our accustomed thoughts, make our usual small talk, go through the trivial round, the common task, without any self-determining effort of will at all.

To mix a metaphor, once a habit takes root, it takes some effort to drive it off the rails.

Interestingly, Mason presents the foundation of habits with a prescient idea: that developing the habit of attention is the key to growth.

The highest intellectual gifts depend for their value upon the measure in which their owner has cultivated the habit of attention.2

In her day, children weren’t behaviourally addicted to screens3, so in fact the examples she cites appear laughable to modern ears. But the principle is important — it’s about developing the habit of looking with intentionality and curiosity at the thing in front of you.

I heard just yesterday of a man who would regularly visit the National Portrait Gallery, each time looking at just one painting. In fact, each time they returned they would head to the same painting until they felt there was absolutely nothing further that they could draw from it, and only then would they allow themselves to move on to another.

Maybe that’s psychotic.

But how often do we do the opposite, wandering around a gallery, quickly observing painting after painting (trying to get our monies worth) and yet missing the masterful works that painters spent countless hours developing, honing, and crafting into the work that stands before you.

Instead of the habit of attention, we have now developed the habit of capturing and sharing memories, without the least bit of attention involved:

We are no longer guided by our curiosity, but by the mob. Whatever is popular holds our limited attention, and only for a limited time; long enough to capture and move on.

It recently occurred to me that we say pay attention. This seems a fitting phrase because there is indeed a cost involved. If you give your full attention to something, you are like a farmer, carefully preparing a field for a crop over a year. But, if your attention is divided, you are more like a farmer sowing a bit in this field, a bit in another a few miles away. At the end, the harvest is patchy and unfruitful, if you get around to it at all.

To coin a phrase: you reap what you sow.

Attention sits at the bottom of the house of cards. Without it, the habits of thinking, imagining, and a desire for knowledge and excellence — they all fall down.

And, of course, if you cannot pay attention to books, you’ll believe you don’t enjoy reading.

Charlotte Mason’s teachings have given me some food for thought, so I think I’ll come back to them in a future article. What do you think?

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Quote of the week

“A bit of boredom is good for us, so the next time you have a minute to spare, instead of reaching for your phone, be rebellious: Daydream.”

— Christine Rosen, On the Death of Daydreaming

It might seem strange after writing about the importance of attention to drop a quote about the importance of boredom, but I believe both are necessary to a balanced mind.

For my personal take on boredom, you can read I’m Bored: In Defence of Boredom

That’s all for today. Have a wonderful weekend. 😊

Graham

Each week I touch on reading, parenting, motivation, children’s books, education, writers, and whatever else catches my attention. Enjoy!

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This week’s footnotes 🧐

The Promise That Prevents Us From Reading

Each morning, I take my dog, Archie, for a walk to a nearby park. I live in London, and probably see a hundred people the moment I step out of my door!

There are the students of questionable fashion (or fashionably questionable students) heading to Chelsea College of Arts. There are grey-suited, grey-faced folk, shoes clipping importantly on the ground as they talk loudly into their phones. There are Italian families on tour, four abreast, walking unbelievably slowly.

After hundreds of these short journeys, there is one pet peeve (hah) that occurs reliably enough. At a particular junction, my path crosses a flow of human traffic, all heading somewhere with purpose. Without fail, they plough on through, forcing me to wait for them.

I can be painfully polite at times, which I’m sure is the sort of behaviour that causes Brits to have heart disease. I wait: patient, demure, saint-like — yet with daggers in my heart. Archie looks at me balefully. “Alpha male, I don’t think,” he says.

(I’ll get to the bit about reading shortly).

The average person1 today is so intent to get to their destination that any pause or detour seems a huge inconvenience. Even, I accept, when walking my dog. I just want him to do his business so I can get back to my business.

Here’s my half-baked hypothesis for the week: we stopped reading books2 because books don’t take us in a straight line to our destination.

Yes, I know it’s the damn phones. Obviously.

But the allure of phones is not simply dopamine. It is also the promise. There is a promise that every time we unlock the screen, we will learn, be entertained, and feel loved. That something will happen. The phone provides a counterfeit shortcut to our heart’s desires. In that respect, it is the ultimate productivity tool3.

But instead of settling for the status quo (whether that’s walking the same route to work, reading only books that offer self-improvement, or looking to our phones for joy) we can become inquisitive and open-minded. We can allow detours, observing the journey and looking around us at new things. We can allow friction in numerous ways that adds colour back into our lives.

Reading fiction might not get you from A to B in the quickest time. It might not help towards your specific leadership goals, or teach you how to train your puppy. But instead of going from A to B, you might discover C — an altogether more tasteful destination, with fewer lager-louts. It might teach you the more subtle facets of leadership — care, attention, heroism, empathy, wisdom. It might not teach you anything about puppies at all. But you will be happier, and your puppy will be happier as a result. Take it from Archie.

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The Dual Coding Delusion

This week’s recommended read is The Dual Coding Delusion, from .

David’s Substack (The Learning Spy) is fascinating and insightful. “A sharp, provocative dispatch from the front lines of education, where ideas are tested, myths are challenged, and nothing is taken for granted.”

Like Myth Busters, but for education.

Dual coding is essentially using visuals mapped with text to enhance learning. There are rules to when this works and when it doesn’t. The problem is that some image/text combos actually make learning more difficult:

in schools, the idea often mutates lethally. It becomes:

• Visuals are always good. (They aren’t.)

• Every concept must include a diagram or an icon. (Most shouldn’t.)

• If it looks accessible, it must be effective. (Not necessarily.)

• Cartoons make content memorable. (Only if the cartoon helps you think about the content.)

Some of the examples in the article took me right back to my biology class:

It might just be anecdotal, but in the above example, I feel my brain working harder as it tries to uncouple both sets of information and hold them together in mind at the same time. For teachers, ‘drawing live’ (drawing each element as you learn about it, rather than presenting a full diagram at the start) appears to be most advantageous.

The cautionary tale, then, is simple. Every theory worth applying in schools can be misunderstood, overextended, or turned into policy by PowerPoint.

This pattern is one I’ve become familiar with in my limited foray into the world of education — grand theories that make their way into practical lessons, without scrutiny or feedback loops to understand their true impact (good or bad).

Or, in the case of handing Chromebooks to school kids, mistaking the result for the process. Digital literacy requires a broader skillset than simply using a computer, which just about any old muggle can manage these days.

So, when you’re considering adding an image to that PowerPoint, think twice:

A good image doesn’t decorate a point; it makes one. It should clarify what words alone would leave vague, reveal connections that speech obscures, and give form to the abstract. If an image doesn’t help pupils think in a way they otherwise couldn’t, it’s pointless distraction.

Read the full article here (a small section towards the end is paywalled).

Quote of the week

“The mind is a story engine, and those who learn to control it will thrive.”

— Dan Koe

That’s all for today. Have a wonderful weekend. 😊

Graham

Each week I touch on reading, parenting, motivation, children’s books, education, writers, and whatever else catches my attention. Enjoy!

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This week’s footnotes 🧐

Here are this week’s footnotes1. Leave a comment with your take!

Let’s make handwritten letters a thing again 💌

This year I bought a nice fountain pen, and have begun sending handwritten letters2. How quaint!

Call me an old romantic if you will (or possibly just old) but the feeling of receiving a personal, handwritten letter really is special. And that got me thinking… perhaps receiving a letter would motivate children to read and write more — for the joy of it. How many children receive handwritten letters these days?3

So here’s the sales pitch: if you become a paid subscriber, I will write a handwritten letter to your kids (or you, if you’d rather) each month. The payment isn’t a lot, but it will help cover stamps, ink, and more importantly, coffee.

I’m happy to write about anything - answering questions, writing a little poem or short story, or just telling them a joke, or a story from my life (which might seem like a joke, though I assure you it isn’t).

And, of course, they will be welcome (indeed encouraged) to write back. That way we can get a conversation going!

Does infotainment work? 🖼️

Thanks to Jocelyn, who wrote in about her experience visiting the Titanic Exhibition in London:

It relied heavily on virtual experiences and little on written explanations or artefacts, like a ‘normal’ museum.

Apparently, the written elements were poorly written and had typos, as though they were an afterthought. Jocelyn questions whether this might be the future of museums - exciting, but probably far less accessible:

I spoke to an older man who was sitting down and not able to take part in any of the VR headset experiences, he said he found them too dizzying and couldn’t stand for so long walking in darkness around a room.

Are museums supposed to help us experience the subject, or to learn about the subject? Can both be done in tandem effectively, or does an emphasis on the entertaining elements simply serve to overwhelm visitors?

I like the new approach as I have also experienced the traditional one, but if all museums go this way I worry what our kids will learn from them.

What do you think?

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Worth a read 💯

This week’s must-read is Why Attention Must Become Curriculum, from - a newsletter “devoted to reclaiming the art of deep learning in an age of ceaseless distraction.” Right up my street!

Quick tangent: I spend a lot of time listening to podcasts - when I’m washing up or cooking, especially. Recently, I’ve replaced some of that time listening to long-form articles on Substack. The writers that I follow often have richer, more coherently presented information than many podcasters4.

Substack provides a robot reader 🤖 so I can play any old article, and it will be read out by a semi-realistic voice. It isn’t perfect though, so when I listened to Why Attention Must Become Curriculum I was pleasantly surprised because the author, , had recorded his own audio. While the recording isn’t perfect, having the author’s voice made a big difference and made listening more enjoyable. I’m inspired to try recording my own in future as I have once or twice in the past!

Back to the article, which argues that the point of education is not simply to prepare children for the workplace, but “to develop autonomous human beings capable of directing their own attention, making their own judgments, and participating meaningfully in democratic life.”

Rather than giving children Chromebooks and expecting them to somehow manage to work amidst the notifications and tabs and sounds, we should provide children with a sanctuary to work without distraction.

This is the fundamental contradiction of contemporary education policy. We recognize that students are struggling … yet our institutional response is to intensify the very conditions producing these outcomes. We add more screens, more platforms, more algorithmic mediation. We complain about distraction while leaving in place school schedules already fragmented into periods too short for deep work. We gamify learning with points and badges and leaderboards. We teach students how to use AI tools but not whether they should.

Some suggestions offered include:

1. Change how we utilise the time available: longer classes, protected blocks of focussed time to learn and work

2. Teach students about digital platforms: they are designed to be addictive, that multitasking is a myth, and that their brains are being shaped by their habits in ways that will persist into adulthood

3. Demonstrate what attention looks like:

When students see adults who can sustain focus, who read deeply, who think slowly and carefully about complex problems, who resist the pressure to respond instantly to every message, they learn that such ways of being are possible.

Challenging and encouraging!

Read the full article here.

Quote of the week 🎤

“Attention is not something students either have or lack; it’s a capacity that can be systematically developed or systematically eroded depending on the environments we create.”

— Andrew Cantarutti

Well, that’s all for today. Have a wonderful weekend. 😊

Graham

Each week I touch on reading, parenting, motivation, children’s books, education, writers, and whatever else catches my attention. Enjoy!

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This week’s footnote 🧐

Just one footnote1 as I’ve been away this week. Leave a comment with your take!

Should children have to finish their books? 🥦

Growing up, were you made to eat your greens before being allowed dessert?2 In our home, sweet food was sometimes used as an incentive (bribe) to encourage us kids to finish healthier food.

Should children be forced to finish their books, just as I was forced to finish my healthy food?3

Both reading and eating involve taste and nutrition, of sorts. Just as not all food is nutritious, not all books are good for us. And just as children need encouraging to develop a taste for greens, they also need nurturing to develop a habit to read good books.

With Storygram Parents, motivation is my number one goal. Once a child is motivated to read, they will become a reader.

But does forcing children to finish every book:

1. motivate them to read more? Or,

2. develop their tastes?

Example one: Marcus Rashford’s Self Help Book

I mentioned a few weeks ago that I’m helping one child to enjoy reading more. One book on the list was Marcus Rashford’s You Are a Champion. I was hesitant to put it on the list; it’s basically children’s self-help, and is almost certainly not written by him. But he was given the book as a gift, so we went with it.

At first, he enjoyed the book, but after a while he found it boring. When I asked him questions about it, he had legitimate issues with it. He felt the book focussed too much on Rashford’s extraordinary footballing achievements. Our kid is not very sporty, but the book is heavy on sports analogies. He also seemed repelled by the self-help lingo, which I thought quite sensible.

In this scenario, with the child providing thoughtful rationale from reading a decent portion of the book, I am inclined to suggest he can shelve it. We might mark it as ‘unfinished’ on his reading list, so he doesn’t gain the full points. But he has gained points for reading each chapter, and he’s given a clear case for why he’s not enjoying it that is more related to content than a lack of reading discipline.

In this scenario, seeking to avoid the trap of reading-as-a-chore seems more important than finishing what might be a ‘bad’ book for the sake of it.

Example two: Treasure Island

A hypothetical case now: if a child is given a classic children’s book such as Treasure Island and decides halfway through that they do not like it or are struggling to understand it fully4, how do parents respond?

This is closer to “eat up your greens”. Classic books have stood the test of time, read by multiple generations. They help us to think about life beyond our limited view. They are more alike to an Ottolenghi salad—healthy, varied, and delicious—once you become accustomed to the flavour.

In this scenario, children might need to learn encouragement and discipline to push past their initial reaction to sprouts (even if they discover much later on that their parents don’t like them either). Or perhaps it’s about letting them pause the book and return in a year when their reading confidence is higher.

Summary

If we don’t grow and develop in our tastes from childhood, we miss out on the abundance of choice and flavour the world offers us. Like the friend who still doesn’t enjoy eating olives or almonds at thirty, children who aren’t encouraged to read beyond their immediate interests will have their reading experiences limited by their childish tastes.

Adults have every right to put a bad book down. There are too many books to read to force your way through all the bad ones. But children don’t fully appreciate the difference between good and bad yet. And that’s where parents come in.

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Can I ask a favour? 🙏

If you could comment, share, or like our articles, it helps the algorithm make good choices 😜

Perhaps you can think of one parent who might be interested to send the link to?

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Thank you so much! ❤️

Quote of the week:

“When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.”

— C.S. Lewis, On Three Ways of Writing for Children5

That’s all for today. Have a wonderful weekend. 😊

Graham

Each week I touch on reading, parenting, motivation, children’s books, education, writers, and whatever else catches my attention. Enjoy!

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This week’s footnotes 🧐

Here are this week’s footnotes1. Leave a comment with your take!

1. What childhood book stuck with you? 🌋

I’ll go first!

While I absolutely adored the Hobbit and lapped up Redwall, Narnia, and many other such adventures, one book is fixed in my mind as something of a childhood altering experience.

That is I Am David, by Anne Holm:

I became a different child after reading this book.

I’m forever banging the drum that reading develops empathy2, but this might be my first personal example. If you don’t know the story, I Am David follows a 12-year-old boy who has been living in a concentration camp. He is helped to escape by one of the guards, and we then follow his journey across Europe.

I truly believe reading this book planted a tiny seed in me — a consciousness of other people’s lives, perhaps — that hadn’t existed before. That’s the power of children’s books.

What book has stuck with you since childhood?

Leave a comment

2. Parents: Help us build something new! 🧪

What do you call a carpenter’s prototype?
A stool sample.

Wait — don’t leave!

I’m developing a prototype of an online service to help parents get good book recommendations to match their kid’s interests and reading level. The aim is to help children find those unlocking books that turn reading from a chore into joy.

The more parents I can get involved, the better. I’ll write more about this in future, but for now just message me to flag your interest, and I’ll send you a little more info and add you to the first cohort!

3. When do you read? 🌃🏙️

Psst 🤫 If there’s one secret to raising children who love to read, it’s probably this: enjoy reading yourself.

So the question is, when do you read? How do you make time for it?

Back when I commuted to work, it was easy enough — I had a spare couple of hours each day to sit and read on the tube.

But now I work from home, I have to be far more intentional. Even with my above-average interest in reading, I have to fight guilt that comes with reading on the sofa for an hour. Especially if I’m caught reading as my poor wife heads out to her job!

I’m armed with the knowledge and understanding of why reading is beneficial. Yet somehow my frantic mind still suggests that reading is not productive. “You should be writing that Substack,” it says.

I honestly believe we all have time available, whether it’s a snatched 15 minutes at home or waiting at the doctors. But we have to plan for it, as reading doesn’t happen accidentally.

When do you read?

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Can I ask a favour? 🙏

It’s my birthday this week, so…

Could comment on, share, or like our articles? It helps the algorithm make good choices 😜

Perhaps you can think of one parent who might be interested to send the link to?

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Leave a comment

Thank you so much! 🎂

Worth a read 💯

Speaking of finding time to read: Victorian coal miners managed it, so what’s your excuse? At least, that’s according to this week’s must-read from : Are You Smarter Than A Coal Miner?

The article highlights revelations about the inner lives of the Victorian working classes found in The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes3 including:

There was a massive, self-directed culture of education among working-class people:

…they read voraciously, with many even choosing to self-study Latin or history after long shifts underground or in factories.

Coal miners, mill workers, and mechanics built their own libraries and formed reading societies to study Shakespeare, Dickens, Milton, and even Plato.

Hundreds of working-class autobiographies reveal the depth of their inner lives

One miner recalls reading Paradise Lost underground by candlelight, and another describes saving for months to buy a volume of Carlyle.

Books were companions in a lifelong pursuit of wisdom

The example provided by the workers of industrial Britain exposes the smallness of our own modern excuses, such as claims to have “no time” to read, or our addiction to entertainment. On this point, however, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes provides much needed encouragement — it demonstrates that people living in objectively worse conditions than our own still managed to cultivate a beautiful interior life through reading.

Read the full article here.

Word of the week: Tsundoku

It sounds lovely when it’s about books, but some people might call that hoarding….

Well, that’s all for today. Have a wonderful weekend. 😊

Graham

Each week I touch on reading, parenting, motivation, children’s books, education, writers, and whatever else catches my attention. Enjoy!

Subscribe now

Worth a read 💯

Breaking the format a little, I’m leading with this essential piece from and , for . It’s a biggie, and couldn’t be more relevant to Storygram Parents.

It’s called A Guide to Surviving the Age of Post-Literacy: How to raise (or become) a reader.

If you aren’t aware of Ruth and Peco, they produce consistently thorough, thoughtful, and practical articles, and this is no exception. (They also have a wonderful habit of finding lovely art that perfectly accompanies each piece).

Doomer Optimists

The opening gives ample evidence (much of which Storygram readers will be aware of) about the decline in literacy, reading enjoyment among children, and the general outlook for our kids. But rather than remain in a ‘doomer’ state, the post is a clarion call to do something about it:

While many will rightly continue to bemoan current trends, analysis of the problem won’t save us. We need to encourage literacy and a love of reading in our youth…

We can’t lay the responsibility for this task solely in the lap of institutions or corporations. The locus of control lies with each individual and within our homes.

(Emphasis added by me).

Summarising such a considered piece in what is supposed to be my short weekly newsletter is not really doable. So I’ll simply say this post is more like a resource. I’ll be coming back to it again and again for pointers and links and book recommendations.

They broadly cover:

• Reading to your children

• Teaching children the foundations of reading early, using phonics

• Learning a wide vocabulary

• Reading classic books

• How to get started reading.

I will say, I was delighted to discover that as I reached the end of the article, Storygram got a mention! ❤️

Read the full article here.

This week’s footnotes 🧐

Here are this week’s footnotes1. Leave a comment with your take!

1. Will AI replace authors? 🖋️

This year, my wife and I started a new routine. Often on a Sunday evening, just as the Monday blues begin to kick in, we pop on a movie. Specifically, an Anime film2.

Why Anime? Partly because we want to be surprised. There’s beauty, mystery, strangeness, surprise, shock, and sometimes even horror. But rarely do the characters or plot move in a predictable direction.

But what does this have to do with AI authors?

Algorithmically suboptimal

Well, I suspect many Anime movies are algorithmically suboptimal. By which I mean studios or labels looking primarily to make sales might fight against the instincts of the creators which make these films what they are. (I understand this happens with studios already as producers get involved, and whole scripts get ripped up with marketing in mind. With data-led generative AI, just turn that concept up to 11).

For example, these films are mostly cartoons. They are often over two hours long. Every so often there is no dialogue throughout the entire film. Who is that designed for? Not the modern child, I suspect: when my wife and I watched the Lego movie, it was so overwhelming (a blizzard of colour and noise) that we both fell asleep!

AI authors will be directed by the ‘suits’ to produce works that hit all the right data points. I have no doubt they will do this effectively: well before AI came on the scene, Pixar had fine-tuned their story telling rules3 which have brought at least one grown man close to tears.

It is not so much about quality, then. And we know that AI can already convince users that it is intelligent, to devastating effect4.

The first generation without their own creative legacy

Where the quality comes from is another question. What marketing calls generative AI, calls regurgitative AI, which seems closer to the mark. LLMs are fed the wealth of human creativity and experience, mash it up and spit it back. So this leads to the next concern: will this generation be the first without a legacy of creative works to hand to the next?

The danger of writing for shareholders

Many authors only become recognised after their death5. That matters because some of the wealth of writing that ChatGPT stole (ahem, sorry, relies upon) wasn’t recognised for a long time. And if AI is concerned about anything, its the shareholders. It’s looking for immediacy, a return on investment, and market gains.

These are not friendly terms to the writer who is writing from their hard-won experience and from their soul.

If we allow writing to be dictated under such conditions, an echo chamber becomes unavoidable. But cultural ideas often flow from writing, and even those that are counter-cultural may become mainstream in decades to come.

The reader/writer connection

Let me wrap up with this. I believe there is a kind of spiritual connection between the reader and the author.

Even if you are a century apart, a thread exists between you when reading their words. You consider them, remember them, interrogate them in your mind. You wonder at their experiences. You might admire them, or even loathe them. But you cannot remain wholly neutral to the writer. Not so with AI. If you are aware of the machine-basis of the writing, a subtle but important link is removed between reader and writer.

For absolute clarity, as I aim to publish books with Storygram: we will not be allowing AI-written works to enter our catalog6.

Am I a luddite?

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Can I ask a favour? 🙏

I’m so grateful to each of you for reading Storygram Parents.

As I try to raise awareness of this Substack, it helps very much if you could comment, share, or like our articles. It helps the algorithm to make good choices 😜

Perhaps you can think of one parent who might be interested to send the link to?

Here are a few buttons to make it easy! It only takes a moment:

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Thank you so much. Onwards and upwards! 📖

2. Learning is like making popcorn 🍿

What did the amygdala say to the prefrontal cortex?
“You overthink everything!”

Parents are rightly concerned for the development of their children. When progress seems to halt, you might be inclined to leap in and fix things.

One encouragement for learners of all ages is this: growth is not linear. Put another way, you can be growing and yet see no improvement for a period of time.

How does that work? I suspect it’s to do with neuroplasticity - the growth and reorganisation of neural networks over time through repetition. But what I do know is that practicing consistently without seeing obvious improvement is an essential part of becoming a life-long, resilient learner. It’s an act of faith.

The initial stage of practicing any new task is accompanied by performance gains7. But as you continue, gains slow, and then pause. In weight lifting, you are advised to increase the load gradually to ensure that the muscles are under strain, even as they develop more strength.

I am not convinced that reading development is like weight lifting, though. I believe it’s more like making popcorn. With popcorn, you apply heat, and nothing much happens. You might hear faint signs of activity, but there will be a few minutes where you have to simply trust the process.

Then, you hear the first ‘pop’! Praise God for predictable scientific laws that result in tasty treats! One after another, the corn kernels reach a critical point of heat, and the metamorphosis from tooth traumatiser to salty snack is complete.

Guiding children towards consistent reading is the goal. Growth and progress will come, but are secondary to enjoyment, which has a far greater chance of producing life-long readers.

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Quote of the week

We will soon need to read books for protection. We will need them for survival. We will seek them out because they offer an escape from the degraded digital domains, where duplicity is now dictated by the largest platforms with the richest owners.

Maybe some people think books are boring. But they just might change their minds when they’ve fully grasped what’s coming on their screens.

— , The Glorious Future of the Book8

That’s all for today. Have a wonderful weekend. And read a book! 😊

Graham

I started building Storygram Ltd to address a specific problem: children are no longer reading for fun. I was only too aware of the benefits of reading in my life, and felt that children could not afford to miss out on this gift.

Over the past year, I’ve spent time researching and writing about the issue here on Substack. The data is clear enough. Additionally, I’ve become increasingly convinced that reading for pleasure really is a life-altering activity.

Reading has a deep impact on our knowledge, empathy, social mobility, mental health, imagination, and even our very character.

As I began writing about the problem, I began to notice more press coverage, among a growing national interest.

I wondered if this was simply the Frequency Illusion — seeing something you are interested in everywhere, like when you’re considering a car to buy. But no, the importance of reading (and its demise) is being discussed everywhere: The Washington Post, the New York Times, the Atlantic, the Telegraph, the Free Press, the Guardian, the Independent… you get the idea. The UK Government even declared 2026 “The National Year of Reading”.

The Sunday Times’ new campaign: Get Britain Reading, is just the latest example.

Social media posts are now the main place people read

Here’s the depressing headline that came with their release:

The Sunday Times has today launched a campaign to Get Britain Reading as new data shows that people of all ages now read social media posts more often than books.

The stats are shocking. According to the Reading Agency, social media posts are now the top reading format across all age groups.

Subtitles are the next most common format of reading. Subtitles!

It’s clear enough that time spent on screens is time not reading print books - so the question is: Will this campaign move the needle?

Donate, volunteer, pledge

The campaign has three primary goals:

• Donate to Bookbanks to put books in the hands of those most in need.

• Volunteer to read in schools with Coram Beanstalk.

• Pledge to read for pleasure for at least ten minutes a day for six weeks.

These are laudable goals. In particular, I think the Bookbanks initiative is an intelligent and excellent use of the existing Foodbank infrastructure to give low-income children opportunities to own books.

One comment on the campaign page tells a tragic, but possibly common story:

Books and reading were heavily discouraged in my house, to the point of physical abuse, if I was caught “swotting”. Luckily I had access to an excellent town library, very encouraging grandparents and a stubborn streak a mile long.

“It’s time to act”

Children deserve to live in a world where reading a book is normal (at home, or in public).

The Sunday Times campaign isn’t specifically aimed at children, though both the Bookbanks and Coram initiatives are more child-focussed. The Sunday Times pledge is more likely an appeal to adults (though arguably the average Sunday Times reader doesn’t need to pledge to read 10 minutes per day).

Either way, I do hope that campaigns like this can have meaningful impact, just as at Storygram Parents we’ll continue with our goal to help parents motivate their children to read.

Perhaps together we can begin to move the needle back in the right direction.

Each week I touch on reading, parenting, motivation, children’s books, education, writers, and whatever else catches my attention. Please reply with your thoughts, and share at will!

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This week’s footnotes 🧐

Here are three footnotes from this week. Leave a comment with your take!

1. Storygram Labs is now Storygram Parents

You may have noticed something slightly different about this week’s newsletter. Answers in the comments!

It’s taken almost a year of writing and thinking for this to dawn on me, but I’ve realised that I specifically want to help parents raise children who love reading. I’m convinced enough of the benefits, and horrified enough at the demise in reading enjoyment, to want to do something about it. I’m convinced this will be worth my blood, sweat, and tears!

Somehow, clarity about who my audience is has made me feel more excited (and productive) than I have been since at the start of this journey.

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2. Raising long-form thinkers in a short-form world

A hundred years ago, only elites had access to the variety and quantity of food that we take for granted today. Night or day, I can unthinkingly eat a selection of food that medieval kings might have gone to war over.

Similarly, the smorgasbord — the absolute glut — of online information is something that early academics and monks alike could have only dreamt of.

But if you’ve ever eaten until falling into a sofa-coma (or worse), you’ll know that abundance can have a price.

An abundance of information inevitably leads us to consume information in smaller and smaller chunks, as evidenced by the rapid rise of YouTube videos, then Instagram Reels, then TikTok. Our minds can’t appreciate their limits, and just as children (and occasionally adults) eat until they are sick, we gorge online until our minds become sick.

For entertainment purposes, shorter formats, at best, are just less fulfilling.

But with certain content such as news or politics, short-form content is dangerous: it lacks nuance, context, and care. The algorithm feeds that which enrages. We all know where that path leads: the divisive world we find ourselves in.

In a short-form world, there is no time for nuance. Even with good friends, it is challenging to discuss certain topics without a serious amount of careful worldview unpacking. Who has the humility and open-mindedness, or even the time and patience for that?

This, as much as anything, is one of the foundational reasons that children must read books. Books are, perhaps, the ultimate long-form content. They require measured consumption. They encourage consideration of context, multiple storyline threads, and do not often allow a simplistic narrative of absolute right and wrong. They illustrate the complexity of the world.

I believe that children who read books are more disposed towards interrogating both sides, towards empathy, and to drawing conclusions only after careful consideration. The world is going to need men and women who display these characteristics more than ever in the days to come.

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3. How do you talk to your kids about books?

I hear you: lighten up, dude!

Okay then: how do you talk to your children about books? Do you discuss what they are reading with them?

There are two stages of engaging with kids about books that I’m particularly interested in:

1. Discovery: understanding their personal interests to aid finding books that will appeal to them.

2. Commentary: having regular ongoing conversations about whatever they are reading - helping them to know their own mind and conclusions.

There’s a lot that goes on in the mind of a child, but sometimes it might need teasing out (sometimes it comes tumbling out unlooked for!)

Both discovery and commentary can be illuminating for parents trying to figure out what appeals to their kids. And, given time, you get to learn what they think about all sorts of things. But there are more or less beneficial ways to get the conversation going - and we need to be careful not to give them the impression that there is a ‘correct’ answer, or else they will only give the answers they think we want to hear.

How do you do it?

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What are you reading? 🤓

This week, I’d love to hear what you are reading right now. No judgment! (Well, not too much). I’ve started a chat on Substack, so please let me know:

Quote of the week

There is something in the very form of reading – the shape of the action itself – that tends toward virtue. The attentiveness necessary for deep reading (the kind of reading we practice in reading literary works as opposed to skimming news stories or reading instructions) requires patience. The skills of interpretation and evaluation require prudence. Even the simple decision to set aside time to read in a world rife with so many other choices competing for our attention requires a kind of temperance.

— , On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life through Great Books

That’s all for today. Have a wonderful weekend. 😊

Each week I touch on reading, motivation, children’s books, education, writers, and whatever else catches my attention. Please reply with your thoughts, and share at will!

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This week’s footnotes 🧐

Here are three questions that occurred to me this week that ended up as footnotes in my journal. Leave a comment with your take!

1. Should books have age grades?

This isn’t a call for censoring. But isn’t it a bit odd that we don’t really know what to expect when we open any given book?

On numerous occasions, I’ve encountered a section of graphic violence or sex in a book that seems to have come from nowhere. I struggle with this. Readers place trust in authors, and sometimes that trust is abused. And while I have heard that you can ‘skip those bits’, I find that to be easier said than done.

Perhaps this is the publishers not wishing to put off purchasers?

Or maybe most readers would rather not have the plot spoilt by meddlesome classifications organisations.

But as someone interested in how to choose good books for children, isn’t some kind of classification useful? Even just to help parents to make choices than to prevent children from reading content way above their age grade.

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2. What makes a great book cover?

In part, this is a sneaky way to make a big announcement:

Storygram is going to publish its first original children’s book!

I can’t say much at this stage, except that I am considering book cover design a lot as we begin work on the illustrations for our new book. It’s all very exciting and new, so watch this space!

Anyway, this week I noticed Ian McEwan’s new book advertised on the tube:

I like the artwork, and the elusive hints make me want to know more.

There’s something, a church spire perhaps, emerging from the water. Is it a flood? Or climate change? And there’s something lurking beneath the water…

The combination of subtle artwork combined with the completely in-your-face yellow title is quite the partnership. The utilitarian text works because it is offset with the natural artwork.

The author’s name is big: he has selling power. Some will buy his books without knowing anything about them — a point I made in a recent post about motivating children to read via authors they know and love:

There are millions of books available. But I would choose to read Terry Pratchett’s books because I trusted the author - I knew I would enjoy it. I was excited to read more about characters I loved. Just as children flocked to buy Harry Potter books the day they came out. Or people lined up in their millions to watch another instalment of spandex-toting superheroes in the cinema.

There’s also the simple truth that you can’t un-read something. When you look at words, the text enters your mind automatically, sometimes before you even realise you’ve read it.

I’ve discovered there are two versions of this book cover design for different markets:

Both use similar approaches: subtle, artistic imagery combined with large text. The mirror (or is it a reflection of trees in water?), the fallen, golden leaves perhaps referencing ‘fall’ juxtaposed with the green leaves in the reflection - might they reference ‘Eden’, or the past? Old pieces of machinery - perhaps this is about the end of the machine age? A return to nature?

Which design do you prefer? And why do you think the Americans got a different one?

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3. How do parents do it?

It seems to me that parents are faced with an extremely daunting prospect when trying to get their kids reading today. I am amazed by how much parents have to cope with, and raising little readers seems like a pipe-dream in the screen age.

One of our upcoming mini-projects (another announcement!) is a podcast series where I’ll be discussing with parents the challenges of getting kids reading.

If you’re interested in being involved, send me a message! Also, I’m workshopping names for the podcast, so if you have an idea, please let me know.

Worth a read 💯

This is the second time I’ve referenced an article by in Friday Footnotes. Seems I’m quite the fan!

This one is titled I Taught My 3-Year-Old to Read ‘The Hobbit’.

Erik argues that we can teach children to read much earlier than is commonly accepted, and now he’s put his money where his mouth is, with his own son. He’s even recorded a video of his three-year-old reading the following passage from the Hobbit:

In a hole, in the ground, there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry bare, sandy, hole, with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.

The trick to getting them started so young, he says, is “to pretend like you’re in the 1700s”. By which he means a return to one-to-one tutoring, or aristocratic tutoring - a style of education that is now almost completely unfashionable but was successful for millennia.

I’m fascinated by his suggestion that AI offers the potential to provide aristocratic-style tutoring at scale:

Entire schools are springing up with the promise to do exactly that. Or at least, to try to distill the techniques that make this sort of learning so effective. Right now is the most exciting time in child education since Maria Montessori started her first school over 100 years ago.

One example is Alpha School in Austin, Texas, which advertises that it uses AI to do the tutoring. By confining academics to just two hours a day, teachers are replaced by “guides” who demonstrate life skills and lead projects the rest of the time. Many of the school’s impressive results (which include claims by the founders of doubling the speed of learning) stem from trying to replicate the effects of tutoring via AI and adaptive curricula in those two-hour sessions.

That seems an optimistic take on schooling compared to what I’m generally reading online, and I don’t feel thrilled about removing humans from the chain, even with the impressive results touted here. But plenty of illuminating reading here from Erik.

Read the full article here.

Quote

That’s all for today. Have a wonderful (wet) weekend. 😊

Each week I touch on reading, motivation, children’s books, education, writers, or whatever else catches my attention. Please reply with your thoughts, and share widely!

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This week’s footnotes 🧐

I’m trying a new format - here are three thoughts that occurred to me this week that ended up as footnotes in my journal. Leave a comment with your take!

1. Finishing a book brings both joy and grief

This occurred to me while writing my latest post, in which I reveal the ultimate secrets to motivation, which have eluded humans for millennia. (Not bad for a Wednesday afternoon).

When reading a story, we get to know, and often fall in love with, the characters. The ending of a story is intrinsically rewarding (wow I got through a whole book, look ma - I’m a reading genius!) - but the end also tends to bring resolution to conflict and ties up loose storylines. Things are revealed that were hidden. Order is restored. Many times I have felt a sense of joyous completion and wholeness as a story resolves.

But… when you read the last word of a book and close the pages, what happens to the characters that you have grown to love? To my twisted mind, they die. Unless there are additional stories, sequels, prequels, spinoffs, etc, the characters essentially become history. They only live as long as the story lives. This is the grief of finishing a book — losing connection with the characters.

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2. We love sequels because we want to live forever

This thought leads on from the first. Why is popular culture so full of sequels, prequels, and spinoffs? Partly, of course, capitalism: the IP is owned by the publisher or studio.

But another partial answer might be that we simply can’t accept death. If we can continue to experience a fictional world full of rich characters that we love, then why should we ever allow it to end? Star Wars - will it ever finish? How about Marvel? (While Disney holds the IP; of course not).

We hold on to these worlds in part because to let go of them would be to accept that life is finite - something we find increasingly difficult to admit. #Philosophy

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3. Should you ever recommend a book that you haven’t read?

Changing gears: recently, I’ve begun creating reading lists (with points! And prizes! 🏆) to help motivate a particular child to read. First, I sought to clarify his current interests, and then researched books around his current reading level. Some suggestions are easy wins with lower points. Some are new, some old. Challenging books get more points.

We’re still in negotiations about the prizes. He has expensive taste.

I currently have 15 books on the list, but I haven’t read 8 of them for myself. Do I go ahead and recommend books based solely on online reviews, or should I bite the bullet and do a speed-read of each on the Kindle before letting the books hit the list?

Is it ever okay to recommend a book that you haven’t read?

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Worth a read 💯

The dawn of the post-literate society by has gone pandemic (viral) on Substack. It’s long (at around twenty minutes) but is a fascinating read.

If I’m honest, it’s also pretty depressing.

James covers the reading revolution of the 1700s, where reading was no longer an elite pastime but was rapidly adopted by the middle and lower classes. He argues that the world of print was responsible for much of the way society then developed, as it invited orderly thinking and reasoning. He argues that literacy laid the groundwork for liberal democracy.

But wait! Over the past decades, a counter revolution has been steadily unfolding. Reading pleasure and literacy levels are in “free-fall”. Smartphones replace attention with distraction. Universities are discovering that post-literate cohorts have declined in cognitive ability, attention span, analytical thinking, and even IQ.

The gains made over three centuries are already being undone.

🎉 Don’t worry - it gets more depressing! 🎉

James reflects on the losses that we will see as literacy declines: intellectual debate (philosophical, scientific, political); creativity and innovation (replaced by a stagnant culture, recycled film franchises (see above!) and simpler music); oral-first thinking (emotion over logic - such as shouting, emotive music, or tears); and finally, the end of democracy!

Yikes. Welcome to the new dark age:

Without the knowledge and without the critical thinking skills instilled by print, many of the citizens of modern democracies find themselves as helpless and as credulous as medieval peasants — moved by irrational appeals and prone to mob thinking. The world after print increasingly resembles the world before print.

Superstitions and anti-democratic thinking flourish. Scholarship in our universities is shaped by rigid partisanship not by tolerance and curiosity. Our art and literature is cruder and more simplistic.

Read the full article here.

Oh, and if you want something to cheer you after that, read The post-literate society is not inevitable, by .

Quote

“Not all reading is created equal. Just as not all food nourishes, not all content feeds the mind. In the age of platforms and prompts, of AI authors and infinite feeds, we are reading more but understanding less. What we consume is increasingly pre-digested cognition: engineered for ease, stripped of its vital ambiguity, void of risk.

Ultra-processed reading is syntactically smooth, cognitively shallow, emotionally inert. This isn’t just about TikTok or Twitter. It’s about how the medium reshapes the mind, how digital habits dull our appetite for complexity, and how a civilisation that forged itself through the long-form written word might forget what it means to think.”

— , Ultra-processed Reading

That’s all for today. Have a wonderful weekend, and try not to think too much about the end of civilisation, won’t you? 😊

1. Agency: giving children a sense of autonomy over what they read

2. Anticipation: giving children a reason to read

3. Achievement: giving children a sense of fulfilment from reading

I find this combination works in motivating grown-ups in many areas, too! For example:

Say you’re getting into running:

• Choosing your route or time or exercise plan (agency)

• Booking a half-marathon with friends (anticipation)

• Celebrating milestones. Also: eating as much as you like! (achievement)

Or maybe you’re learning the guitar. Sure, scales are important for fluency, but motivation also comes from:

• Choosing what music to play (agency)

• Starting a band with your friends (anticipation)

• Playing guitar at the prom (achievement)

As this publication is all about encouraging children to read, let’s consider how the three pillars of Agency, Anticipation, and Achievement, work in that context.

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Agency

Agency is about choice.

Some parents might be relaxed about what their children read, while others may wish to hold a strict level of control over what their children read. But let’s face it; children’s books are variable in quality. Some simply don’t edify, build, or challenge children.

While stories should be enjoyable, they should also inform kids about the realities of life — preparing them for their battles while instilling them with hope. Children are sponges, and giving them examples of other people who overcome obstacles can help inform how they respond.

Or, as G.K. Chesterton famously put it:

“Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed.”

There are also an overwhelming number of children’s books. Giving children open-ended choice is likely to lead to choice overload, where they become paralysed by the sheer number of options available (a sensation familiar to anyone who’s tried to choose a movie on Netflix).

Parents can overcome the challenge of choice by:

• Curating a limited list of parent-approved books to give children a sense of agency without total free rein. Or,

• having a stricter list but rewarding children with any book they want (no judgement guaranteed).

I remember my mum being particularly cheesed at me for selecting a random book called something like True UFO Stories from the school library because it was trashy. (She was right, of course - and why the library had decided to stock it the question I ask thirty years later). But rather than simply criticising my poor choices, she continued to carefully curate lists for me to select from, motivating me towards more challenging books with rewards (she operated a points system for each book) and I came out through my childhood relatively unscathed from conspiracy theories. Except the one where I think perhaps everyone else is a robot.

If you allow your children to make some mistakes, they might (as with my childhood experience) feel more inclined to read the books they are given. And anything they read is building fluency of reading, which is key to furthering unlocking their reading enjoyment, fuelling more reading.

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Anticipation

Anticipation can be subconscious to a degree. For example, the subtle craving to check Instagram/WhatsApp/emails. There’s a good feeling attached with receiving a message or notification. It’s a simple as this: someone remembered that you exist.

Additionally, anticipation and trust are closely linked. Some people thrive on the buzz of new experiences, but many like to experience more of what they know. It’s safer, with less risk. This is one reason that sequels have become commonplace in popular culture over the past thirty years (in movies and books especially) and why certain artists (music or art) grow enormous fanbases while others languish in obscurity. This is more to do with risk than quality.

Consider the Marvel cinematic universe: a series of 37 movies (to date) since Iron Man in 2008. Thirty-seven films that, for the most part, follow a similar, predictable formula. The characters are fairly well known (especially to comic-lovers). The plot invariably grows towards some epic proportion battle (with giant beams of light in the sky). The good guys have some in-fighting. There’s much snarky banter. Some of these films were quite enjoyable. But audiences flocked to the films not only because they loved the characters or the spectacle, but because they knew what to expect.

One of my favourite authors is Terry Pratchett. I can’t remember if it was ‘Only You Can Save Mankind’, or the ‘Truckers, Diggers, Wings’ trilogy, but once I had read one of his books, I was hooked. Reading as a child, his cheeky humour and sense of adventure had me gripped. As I grew older, I began to understand the satire behind many of the characters or plots. I became obsessed with Discworld, (41 books in total). Every time a new one came out, I lapped it up.

There are millions of books available. But I would choose to read Terry’s books because I trusted the author - I knew I would enjoy it. I was excited to read more about characters I loved. Just as children flocked to buy Harry Potter books the day they came out. Or people lined up in their millions to watch another instalment of spandex-toting superheroes in the cinema.

This becomes particularly interesting when considering how to encourage children to anticipate reading. For a start, many things are novel to children. Many times, the book they are reading will be the first time they have read anything by that author. This can result in a sliding scale of reactions. On the one hand, fear - will I enjoy this book? On the other; excitement - I can’t wait to find out what it’s all about!

This reaction is partly a product of the child’s makeup; how risk-averse are they in general? Also, reading fluency; the less fluent a child, the more investment goes into deciding and reading each book. Additionally, by marketing and branding; if the title is good and the cover is attractive, children will feel more inclined to take a risk. And finally, social proof; if their friends are talking positively about it, the book has a head start.

Children’s enjoyment of reading is plummeting. If they are reading less, they are less confident readers, and therefore more risk-averse. Rather than anticipating, they begin to dread reading. New books and authors hold more fear for them - a greater investment in time and effort. A confident reader might shrug off a read they didn’t enjoy, and move straight on to the next one. But for the inexperienced reader, one unenjoyable book tells them something they already suspected: reading is awful.

A couple of suggestions here:

We want young readers to become balanced readers. If you discover a series or author that they love, this is fantastic! But rather than just letting them read everything that author has done, you can use the trust they have to increase their anticipation and as a reward for reading new, unknown (to them) books. For example, if they love Katherine Rundell, then get them a nice copy of one of her books that they haven’t read, and offer it as an upcoming reward for reading two unknowns.

Secondly, anticipation can come in other forms. I’ve discussed reading environment a little before on Storygram Labs: in summary, creating a safe space for children to read in (think soft lighting, cosy, quiet, calm) and additionally setting boundaries around reading time (for example, for up to an hour they can be guaranteed peace and freedom from reminders about tidying or homework) can help create anticipation around the reading experience.

Anticipation is about giving them a reason to read. What would encourage your children to look forward to reading?

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Achievement

With reading, we can arrive at a sense of achievement in a few ways.

1. Reading is intrinsically rewarding. It’s an enjoyable activity!

2. As reading skill and fluency progresses over time, we might feel a sense of gratification.

3. Finishing a book is rewarding - not necessarily because the end is excellent (it may not be), but because the very act of reading a book from beginning to end is an act of willpower. The reader has chosen to read thousands of words — hundreds of pages — and succeeded through to the end. This can build confidence and reinforce the critical habit of seeing things through.

For children who struggle to get through a book, achievement might look a little different. Reward them for reading 10 minutes uninterrupted per day, perhaps. Add bonus points when they eventually complete a book. Duolingo demonstrates the power of counting ‘streaks’. Kids (and adults) love the satisfaction of ticking off a to-do list… so why not make reading the highlight item each day?

What do you think? Are there other elements critical to motivating children that I’ve missed?

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Thank you for reading!

Each week I include links to relevant news, articles, podcasts, or other media I’ve come across that touches on reading, motivation, children’s books, education, writers, or whatever else catches my attention. Hopefully, it will interest you, too — and please share with your friends and colleagues!

Three quick things 🧐

1. The big US brain freeze 🧠

Last week, the Telegraph published a piece on “the Knowledge Cold War” — referencing how US educational attainment is plummeting, but China’s is rapidly improving after decades of driven effort.

It seems America is beset with problems in education, which may partly stem from, frankly, not caring enough to prioritise it:

America has a smaller social safety net and one of the lowest spending totals on early years education in the OECD [roughly half the average].

The Telegraph say this US literacy crisis ‘threatens to unravel the superpower’.

The comments are pretty illuminating too. This from Jonathan Hutchinson:

My son is being educated in China, he is just entering year 2 of primary school. The math's and English classes are equivalent to a 12- or 13-year-old in the UK (he is in a Chinese class, not international, English is part of the national curriculum).

And Elizabeth Hartman:

I live in the US. When my children were little I did not trust the education system here alone so I took charge and supplemented, taught my children to read early, the importance of books, etc. They both graduated with advanced degrees and are very successful. They have now carried the tradition of reading with my grandchildren. Do not trust the school system here alone to educate your child, it is inadequate.

Read the full article here (paywalled).

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2. Grammar vs. Kids

Take a trip down memory lane (and shudder!) as takes you through this year’s Grammar test for 10/11 year-olds in England.

I love reading, and I love writing. But one glance at the questions here reminds me just how demotivating education can be. (As an aside, I was only really motivated to work hard once I left education, i.e. when money became involved. Maybe we should pay kids to read…?)

Michael is pretty scathing about the relevance, purpose, and practicality of these exams:

Most examiners don’t give a stuff about the stress of exams, and it is of little interest to them how stress often negates what children know. That’s because exams are about grading children and anything that helps examiners ensure that the right percentage of children fail the exam, proves to the examiners they’ve done a good job designing an exam paper.

Ouch.

Also, I’ve just read that Mr Rosen has written more than 200 books! I’m struggling to write one. Come on, what’s your secret, Michael?

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3. The glorious future of the book

makes the case for physical books being an essential storage unit that will outlast any data centre that Zuckerberg or Bezos might build.

Ted argues that books will become essential for our coping with technological challenges, including the onslaught of fake media.

Maybe some people think books are boring. But they just might change their minds when they’ve fully grasped what’s coming on their screens.

Read the full article here.

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Worth a read 💯

has written a fantastic piece titled Why are so few kids reading for pleasure, over on The741.

It’s pretty comprehensive! Possible culprits highlighted include:

• Endless distractions from smartphones/screens

• The Covid pandemic (especially in reducing student resilience for reading longer passages)

• Overbearing schooling, schools with a non-scientific approach to teaching reading, schools favouring short non-fiction passages over fiction

• Kids are simply over-scheduled - to find time to read, they’ll have to drop something else

A few glimmers of hope are also offered, which is refreshing! Such as:

• Can graphic novels present deep text in alternative formats for kids?

• Booktok and Bookstagram as ways to influence more kids to read

• Schools are finally figuring out to ban phones during the day

Read the full article on The74 here.

Quote

“Only in the printed word can complicated truths be rationally conveyed.”

— Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death

That’s all for today. Have a wonderful weekend.

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