Source: The Conversation – UK
This summer, the National Year of Reading is teaming up with sporting figures including Joe Wicks, Clare Balding and Georgia Stanway to encourage people to read. The initiative, part of the campaign’s Summer of Sport programme, links reading activity to major sporting events including Wimbledon, the Fifa Men’s World Cup, cricket and Formula 1.
Team captains like Wicks, Balding and Stanway will share book recommendations, discuss how reading has shaped their sporting interests, and encourage audiences to engage with reading in a range of formats.
The idea is simple. Millions of people already care deeply about sport. Rather than asking people to become interested in reading for its own sake, the campaign seeks to connect reading with interests they already have. It is a sensible approach, but it also raises a question that sits at the heart of many debates about reading today: what counts as reading?
Public discussions about reading often focus on quality. Debates about screen use, social media and reading habits frequently raise concerns about how much time people spend with long-form texts. We debate whether screens are replacing books. We argue about attention spans and “deep reading” (reading with intention).
Underlying many of these discussions is the assumption that some forms of reading matter more than others. But before we ask whether people are reading well, we might need to ask a more basic question: how do people become readers in the first place?
Becoming a reader
Readers often begin somewhere unexpected. A football annual. A manga series. A celebrity memoir borrowed from a friend. Reading rarely starts with abstract arguments about its value. It starts with something that catches our attention and makes us want to turn the page. For one child, that might be football statistics. For another, fantasy novels, romance or gaming magazines. Reading often begins with subjects that already matter.
This is something reading researchers have long recognised: motivation matters. People are far more likely to read when they can see a connection between what they are reading and their own interests, identities or experiences.
Yet these forms of reading are sometimes treated as lesser. There is a long history of drawing distinctions between “good” and “bad” readers, often based on what people read and how they read it.
Comics, popular fiction, romance novels and genre fiction have all, at different times, been dismissed as inferior to more “serious” literature. The result is that some readers come to feel that what they enjoy reading does not really count. If a teenager spends the summer reading football magazines, match reports and player biographies because of a sporting campaign, have they become a better reader?
The answer depends on what we think reading is for.
If the goal is cultural knowledge, we may value some texts more highly than others. If the goal is concentration, we may favour long-form reading. If the goal is empathy, we might point to literary fiction. But if the goal is developing a reading habit, building confidence, discovering pleasure or establishing an identity as a reader, the picture looks rather different.
A teenager who chooses to spend time reading about football is reading. More importantly, they may be developing a relationship with reading that will last long beyond a single sporting season.
Learning from non-readers
Much public discussion about reading comes from people who have always been readers. The focus is often on preserving a valued practice. My own research and author events have led me in a slightly different direction. Through work on reading engagement, including in prisons, I have become increasingly interested in people who do not identify as readers at all.
Again and again, I encounter people whose reading lives do not fit conventional expectations. In prisons, I have met people who describe themselves as “not a reader” while discussing the football biographies, newspapers or crime novels they have just finished.
Others read secretly, worried that reading marks them out in some way. Some stopped reading years ago and later returned to it. Some read only particular genres. What unites them is that their relationship with reading is often far more complicated than the label “reader” suggests.
Becoming a reader is often less straightforward than we imagine. The challenge is not always persuading people that reading is valuable. It is helping them find a form of reading that feels relevant to their lives.
Campaigns such as the National Year of Reading’s Summer of Sport recognise something important: people do not always arrive at reading through literature. They may arrive through football, celebrity interviews, magazines or the stories behind their favourite athletes. The route matters less than the fact that they arrive at all.
We often debate whether people are reading the right things. But the experiences of many reluctant, returning and self-described “non-readers” suggest a different question may be just as important: who gets to decide what counts as a reader in the first place?
Caroline Cauchi does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/07/10/does-it-matter-what-children-read-as-long-as-they-are-reading/