Books for Children: In praise of serious reading: Aisling Foster argues the need for a return to the pleasure principle

A FUNNY THING is happening in children's publishing. Puffin are launching a campaign called Reading For Fun, highlighting books that will 'convince young readers of the PURE PLEASURE of reading'. Children? Reading for pleasure? Shome mistake, shurely? It's hard to know who exactly to blame (Derrida and new-look Eng Lit? Poor old Leavis and his list of greats? The twerp in the 1980s who set TV soap opera on an O-level course?), but for years now I've felt that too many books on offer to my children are all about message or meaning; rarely (after the picture book stage) about sheer, unadulterated enjoyment.

In the past, my complaints to librarians and educators have usually been met with a lecture on the mechanics of reading. Much as fast food and microwave ovens have changed eating into grazing, reading has become browsing. The message was that somehow, by opening a thing which looked like a book and nibbling through bites of Trash Hits, a child was reading and would progress to Nesbit, Lewis or Dickens. Good books, the classics or even modern writers like Jill Paton Walsh would be available when children were somehow 'ready' for them. Mysteriously, such literature was apparently harder for them to grapple with than it had been for my generation in the 1960s.

'At least your children can read well,' the know-betters would say with a reassuring smile. 'Many children grow up without a book in the house: what chance have they of becoming readers?' Well, none, I suppose, if every book they come across is as stale as yesterday's episode of Neighbours. Ah yes, they would continue, you still remember a time when books were our only window on a wider world. You have to understand that your children live in an age of multimedia; they can even get classic books on film and tape.

But, I bleated, is a video viewing of Black Beauty or Five Children and It anything like the experience of reading the book? And what did it mean when the head of Language and Literacy in my local London borough proudly told parents not to worry if their children never progressed from learning to read to reading a proper book? 'Look at me,' she ended her little homily proudly. 'I've never read James Joyce, never needed to, and it doesn't matter. It really doesn't]'

It took me years of such bunk to realise that my idea of a 'reader' was quite different from theirs. The point was brought home when, as a junior school governor in the old ILEA days, I was on the panel interviewing for a head of Language and Literacy. In those times of Equal Opportunity, questions were fixed in advance and no follow-up allowed. Despite such strictures, it soon became apparent from the enquiry, 'What books do you like reading?' that two of the three candidates did not read for pleasure at all, though one was delighted to treat us to lectures on the relative values of reading cornflake packets, shopping lists and social security claim forms. The third candidate was a reader of books, committed to the idea of inspiring children with the same pleasure principle. It therefore came as an even greater surprise when other members of the interviewing panel did not agree with my assumption about the most suitable candidate; I was warned against elitist ideas about reading as a leisure pursuit for which, apparently, the 'working classes' had no call.

The same ethos still hangs on in children's libraries. Ten years ago, when my oldest child was crawling, it was a delight to discover how baby- friendly my local library was. With soft toys, go-cars, Lego, a playhouse, pencils and paper, plus other children thundering and whooping about the place, the library had become a centre for fun, games, mess - anything, that is, except reading and choosing books. Ten years on, the scene is the same, except that now my 11- and 7-year-olds have grown out of the distractions on offer and find the creche atmosphere impossible for reading. Holiday times are worse. Before the latest cuts, clowns, musicians and face-painters were hired by the score. They are gone now, but the carnival atmosphere persists, as scores of pre-adolescents lounge about the tables making their own entertainment: Laugh at the Librarian (and drive her nuts) or Razz the Readers (and make them self-conscious). The last thing that occurs to them is to read a book.

That fear of books, a mistrust of anyone reading for fun, is a recent phenomenon. Surely, in far more deprived societies than ours, books and reading have always attracted respect? Through reading for its own sake, lucky people could escape their circumstances, however drab, and find enrichment in other worlds. Not any more. Thanks to some unholy alliance between the deconstructionists, social arbiters and couch potatoes, reading is viewed, at best, as a means to an end, with books as manuals of instruction; at worst as a pastime for wimps. I am haunted by the last scene in Truffaut's Fahrenheit 451 (derived from Ray Bradbury, most compelling of writers): all those people wandering about in the snow memorising books which have fallen into planned oblivion.

In such a climate I have sometimes wondered how quickly Marshal McLuhan's prediction of the death of the book would come to pass. Will a future generation, encouraged to graze through print for quick snacks between ad breaks and video games, grow up without an appetite for the excellent writing that continues to come out of publishing houses? It is true that there are more books around than in McLuhan's day. And for consumers brought up on pick-and-mix reading schemes, reading is still fun, with many canny publishers responding to their tastes. Books are available in supermarkets, making Danielle Steele and Stephen King shopping-list standards as much as Heinz and Birds Eye.

I have nothing against such fare. But the good stuff, (pace Derrida), what used to be called Literature, is being shelved higher and higher. Unless educators, librarians and publishers try to maintain the pleasure principle in reading, a taste for witty, original, life- changing books may disappear, along, eventually, with books themselves.