Alcalá Grupo Editorial

A recent survey has revealed the extra time spent isolated at home during the coronavirus pandemic has led Japanese teens to up their intake of books.

Val Mc Dermid’s comments (Fiction readers have made the best leaders in Covid-19 crisis, says Val McDermid, 16 August) struck a chord with me. Once, decades ago, I was sent on a work-based software engineering course. Most of those attending, myself included, were bemused by the course leader spending half of the first day on what felt like literary criticism. He was not interested in what textbooks we read, but was particularly interested in what fiction we read, how much, and how varied our literary tastes were. A few of us were asked to sum up in a few words the plot of a favourite work of fiction, or what we thought of it.

For much of history, reading was a fairly noisy activity. On clay tablets written in ancient Iraq and Syria some 4,000 years ago, the commonly used words for “to read” literally meant “to cry out” or “to listen”. “I am sending a very urgent message,” says one letter from this period. “Listen to this tablet. If it is appropriate, have the king listen to it.”