Reading for pleasure

There are those that look down upon reading simply for pleasure, and consider it worthless. Novels, they say, must reflect issues that matter to the times they are written - a story must, they say, tackle the Iraq war, or a homosexual struggling for acceptance amongst his peers, or the immigrant facing racism and bureaucracy, or the imminent extinction of the Grey Throated Wobble Tit. The Booker prize is won year after year by such books.

Genre fiction is sneered upon, considered silly inane trash with as much depth as the average soap opera. But it is this attitude that has turned generation after generation of children away from reading. And yet the attitude that genre fiction is worthless is complete bollocks - Conan Doyle, now considered a master of literature, wrote genre fiction, as did H.G. Wells. And what are the works of superb stylist Raymond Chandler if not genre fiction? Robert E. Howard is another case in point, he all but invented the sword and sorcery fantasy subgenre and his Conan tales were mostly sneered upon by the intelligentsia. Silly really because one can go back to the dawn of the written word to see the formation of genre fiction - the Anglo Saxon epic, Beowulf for instance. And even before that, when cave dwellers sat around the fire, scratching their arses, you can bet the tales they told could have been bunged between paper covers and placed on the genre shelves.

What's wrong with filling a pipe or grabbing a bag of sweets and curling up with a good mystery, or western, or horror story, or fantasy? Once the shops were filled with such books and it's a pity we couldn't bring them back.

Reading should be enjoyable and that's the message to get across if we are to encourage young readers back into the collective of readers (sounds very Star Trek, that!). In many ways writers themselves are to blame - read interview after interview and you will come across deep analysis of their work when the emphasis should be placed on the entertainment value. We all want to entertain our readers.We want to prove that books can provide an experience quite unlike anything else, a far deeper experience and greater involvement with the story than a mere movie or, dare I say it, a computer game can provide.

And we are at an important crossroads now - with the rise of the Internet and eBooks, we are able to get our work onto all those cool devices the kids carry around with them. And don't forget the Harry Potter series proved that children, if given the right material, will lap it up. There are scores of online fiction sites that provide well written, enjoyable stories that could, maybe, introduce some young dude or dudette to a lifetime of reading pleasure. Thieves Jargon, A Twist of Noir and Beat to a Pulp are just three fiction sites worth Googling - should the word googling be capitalized? I guess not but who cares, you know what I mean.

All the cool kids read!