World Book Day: Philip Reeve on why we treasure reading

'The best gift you can give to a child is a book,' says author of the Mortal Engines series.

Author Philip Reeve, who will be celebrating World Book Day, says:
Author Philip Reeve, who will be celebrating World Book Day, says: "The best gift you can give to a child is a book."

I'm sure it came as no surprise to my friends and family when I became an illustrator and then a writer, because from about the age of five I was one of those children who always had his nose in a book.

Four books a week from the central library, another four from the mobile library which stopped round the corner every Thursday; books at school; books for Christmas and Birthday presents... When my son asks me to tell him about 'When I Was A Boy', half the memories I dredge up aren't really mine at all but memories of vicarious experiences enjoyed in the company of fictional characters, from Winnie the Pooh through Biggles and Allan Quatermain, Asterix and Swallows and Amazons to the heroes of Tolkein, Rosemary Sutcliff and the sci-fi authors I read as a teenager.

I still feel, as I did when I was six or seven, that books are simply the best way to experience a story. After all, when we read a book, half the work is ours: the author gives us the plot and the raw materials of description, but the pictures that we see in our heads as we read are pictures which we have created (this is why 'the film of the book' is almost always disappointing: the people and places which we imagined are swept away, and replaced by what the film maker imagines.)

Even tiny children looking at a picture book are using their imaginations, gleaning clues from the images to understand what is happening, and perhaps using the throwaway details which the illustrator includes to add their own elements to the story.

That's why the best gift you can give to a child is a book, and the best thing you can do for your own children when they're small is to read to them. They are never too young to start and you will be spoiled for choice when you go looking for stories to share with them: we really are living in a golden age of children's books.

I sometimes feel quite envious of today's children, growing up in the era of Geraldine McCaughrean and Roddy Doyle, Andy Stanton and Chris Riddell, Axel Scheffler and Sarah McIntyre.

Along with many other children's authors, I shall be busy this week visiting schools to talk about the pleasure and importance of books. Tomorrow, you see, is World Book Day. I don't usually have much patience for Awareness Days and International Weeks of This or That (I believe that one week of the year should be set aside as National Not The Week of Anything Week), but any opportunity to get young people talking and thinking about books these days is an opportunity which ought to be grasped firmly with both hands, and that's why I think WBD (as its friends call it) is an Unreservedly Good Thing.

Schools around the country will be organising book quizzes, readathons, and all manner of literary larks. On the downside, there will probably be some Dressing Up, which is one of the curses of modern parenthood (I'm supposed to knock up a Gruffalo costume between now and Thursday morning how, exactly?).

Do try to remember that it's all in a good cause.

Schoolchildren will also be given a World Book Day £1 book token (a scheme funded by the book trade and National Book Tokens Ltd) which they can use to buy one of the WBD books, written for the occasion by a variety of top children's authors and yours truly. If they're really lucky they will get to skive off double maths so that they can come and hear the likes of me enthuse about the joys of reading...

I don't think you can persuade any red-blooded child to do anything by telling them that it's good for them. I want children to read books for the same reason that I wanted to read and be read to when I was a child: because stories are an adventure playground for your imagination; because good books are wonderful, and exciting, and fun.

Traction City by Philip Reeve (Scholastic) is one of six £1 books specially published on

World Book Day, Thursday 3rd March.