Hello – I hope the beginning of 2026 has been kind to you, and that if you’re in the UK,
you’re managing to stay warm and dry in this wet and rather gloomy weather.
(At least it means that the ponds near my house are filling up again, which is good news
for the moorhens and the ducks.)
Thanks to everyone who’s been in touch to say how much they’ve enjoyed Rainforest,
and special thanks to the many readers who read the Wolf Brother books as children
and are now re-discovering them as adults – including Niklas, Kyle, Sebastian, Ahmed and
Mattijs – not forgetting the children of Torak’s age or younger who have written in too.
I also had an interesting request from a school librarian. In preparation for World Book Day,
she’s asking authors to answer this question:
What do books give us that nothing else can?
I found this surprisingly hard to answer. Maybe it’s because books have always been part of
my life – I’m sixty-five and I’ve been reading for sixty years – so it’s difficult to explain
what they give me that I can’t get from music or a film, or a great work of art (or a computer
game, if you’re into them). Here’s what I came up with in the end:
A book can give you excitement, shivers, comfort and escape. It lets you experience
what it’s like to be another creature – whether that’s an animal, a person or a made-up
monster – far more intensely than you ever could in a computer game or a film.
You get inside their skin. You feel what they’re feeling. You have their adventures.
That’s why, if you find a book which really holds your attention, it can become a
companion that will stay with you for life.
Hmm. Reading that back now, I don’t think I’ve nailed it. It’s too long and too wordy.
Maybe I over-thought it. Maybe you can come up with a better, pithier answer.
Here’s another thing about books. Just this morning I read an article in the newspaper
about concentration. Apparently, neurologists have found that reading a physical,
printed book is better at improving your ability to concentrate than reading on a screen.
It helps rebuild your mental stamina (which can be impaired by scrolling online) and
reduces the tendency to skim (which can develop from too much time online).
Why should this be? Scientists think it’s partly because a printed page is totally still.
You don’t have to scroll down to keep the text moving. This makes reading a printed book
a solitary, silent, peaceful activity; although of course the emotions evoked by the
story might be anything but!
I’m not knocking Kindles or the like; they have their uses – although if you’re wondering,
I haven’t yet got around to getting one. But it’s heartening to learn that something we all
enjoy doing anyway is also doing us good, in unexpected ways.
On that note, I’ll leave you with two pictures of my local heron. First, he’s waiting for
the sun to burn off the early-morning mist over his pond – and when it has, he’s basking
in his favourite tree.
