BookBrunch - World Book Day: Helping non-readers to climb their first mountain

I know first hand the power reading has to change lives and the joys that finishing a book can bring to someone who was previously a non-reader. My dad could hardly read and write until he was in his thirties and had to brave adult literacy classes. He spent years doing what people do when they don't have skills, pretending to have forgotten his glasses and ordering whatever someone else was having at a restaurant because he couldn't read the menu. Thanks to my highly literate mother I grew up with a great passion for literature and books and have always thought that the world of words belongs to me. My son's first sentence was "Mummy read book" - he, too, will view books and reading as sources of pleasure and comfort rather than humiliation and worry. Not everyone has this benefit. It is in part as a result of my dad's story, and the desire to see that transformation on a wider scale, that I got involved in Quick Reads two years ago.