Another day, another dispiriting survey about the crisis in childhood reading. Parents who earn more than £100,000 a year are the least likely of all social groups surveyed to read aloud every night to their children. So much for the sharp-elbowed middle classes. Even when we factor in the possibility that the cash-rich and time-poor are outsourcing bedtime stories to nanny, it’s a less than encouraging finding. It tells us something about the dwindling importance of reading to the most successful among us.

Even popular books are getting shorter and easier to read: their sentences are shorter, their paragraphs are shorter

Even popular books are getting shorter and easier to read: their sentences are shorter, their paragraphs are shorter

It reminds me of something I heard the novelist Sebastian Faulks say not long ago – how when he found himself at a dinner surrounded by “prosperous and accomplished twentysomethings” he heard one say: “I don’t think I could read a whole book. Maybe a chapter, but not a whole book.” Even the educated so-called elites, the people we expect to be not only reading but pressing books on their children, are losing the habit. That likely bespeaks a market/social/evolutionary pressure: you no longer need to read to succeed.

Should we be encouraged, though, that about half of all the people the Sunday Times surveyed did read to their children daily? Personally, I’m as pessimistic about this stuff as I’ve ever been. I clung on for a long time to the idea that reading to your children will, somehow, magically give them the habit of reading for........

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