E45:From your own experience, how would you define the pleasures of reading?

As a very small boy, the first pleasure I had from reading was being able to crow over some of my peers who couldn't. I became less of a little snob as I grew up. At every stage, of course, the reader finds different sources of pleasure. As a child, as far as I can remember, I looked for interest, fantasy and a good laugh. Up to the age of eight or nine, children seem to live in a world of half fantasy and half reality. Many enjoy situations in which adults are outwitted. Thus, popular comics were Dandy, Beano and Rainbow, and not the sobersides Children's Newspaper. The Richmal Crompton 'William' books were great favorites. So was Enid Blyton. Adventure was found in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and R L Stevenson. Crime detection meant Sherlock Homes. Mystery and horror were supplied by writers such as Bram Stoker and Wilkie Collins. In more modern times, there seems to be little significant change, except that Superman, E.T. and space travel yarns have been added.

The common factor in most of this is that the child and young person can pick up a book and escape from the humdrum into a new world of excitement, sometimes identifying with the hero or heroine. Girls tend to favor school stories and, later, magazine romances and romantic novels, taste for the latter often lasting well into adult life.

The attraction of escapism, modified of course by experience, lasts into later life. Most adults enjoy a detective story for relaxation. The murder or crime concerned is rarely dealt with psychologically. It is merely the peg on which to hang the clues leading to the final solution. The best of such stories also develop character to some extent and reflect the social back- ground of the years in which the novel is set. Thus, the pleasure of reading, say Agatha Christie, is partly nostalgia and partly mental exercise. Emotion plays a negligible part.
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