No, It's Vital That They Have Access To Enjoyable Books

The number of children’s books featuring Black main characters fell by almost 8% last year, according to research into diversity in UK publishing.

...not books chosen by committee because they tick a particular box! 

Just 47 – or 2.1% – of the 2,189 books published for under-10s in 2025 featured a Black main character, a 7.8% fall from the previous year, according to Inclusive Books for Children (Ed: another fakecharity). Black children make up about 8.5% of that age bracket in England and Wales.

So what? It's utterly ridiculous to reduce reading for pleasure to a numbers game. Great characters are great characters, and can be enjoyed by anyone. 

Representation of south Asian main characters fell by 14.3 percentage points to 1.4%, despite children of south Asian heritage making up about 12.4% of the population of under-10s. Just three books featured main characters of Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) heritage, down 50% from the previous year. This represented 0.1% of surveyed books, compared with the group’s 2.2% share of the population.

The author Serena Patel said: “At an age when children are figuring out the world around them and where they fit in, it’s vital they have access to funny, inspiring, adventurous books that reflect both the lives they live and the ones they don’t. We must do better.”

You should have stopped that sentence after 'books', what you added after has no bearing on it. 

The survey also highlighted what it described as a lack of “incidental representation”: stories in which a main character’s identity does not explicitly drive the plot of the story.

Make up your minds! 

Dr Stella Louis, an early years consultant, trainer and author, pointed to this “continued reliance” on books where identity itself was the story. “Why can’t a child simply be south Asian, disabled, neurodivergent or bilingual and also be the hero of an ordinary story about friendship, adventure, loss or joy?” she said.

Apparently it;s both bad to have characters who are refugees and also  good to have them, at the same time, which just goes to show how impossible it is to please these people. So why does anyone ever try? 

“As an  Arab author, it is painful to see the number of children’s fiction books representing our region decline from six to only three in 2025,” said Nadine Kaadan. She said the fact that all three books published were focused on refugee experiences risked reinforcing a “single story” about the region, defining it through “war and displacement rather than our rich cultures and heritage”.

What heritage would you like to see, your heritage of antisemitism and slavery and misogyny? 

And if you're an author, isn't the answer in your own hands?  

Jake Hope, a children’s book consultant, said: “When children’s enjoyment of reading is at a significant low, it’s more important than ever that the stories children encounter reflect their lives, identities, experiences and emotions.

Why? Isn;t part of thr pleasure of reading based in learning about other lands or world, and other culture? It alway was for me. 

“These figures need to be more than mere statistics and a call to action for continued change and improvements.”

And as this is 'The Guardian' it wouldn't be complete without the obligatory 'Ooops':

This article was amended on 5 October 2026. In an earlier version Serena Patel was misidentified as Sheena Patel. This has been corrected, and an image of Sheena Patel removed. The first name of Jake Hope was also corrected.

Why does anyone believe anything they print? 

No, Just No!

For the first time ever, we have a British prime minister who studied for an English degree. Not all of his 58 predecessors went to university, but those who did favoured subjects such as history and classics and, more recently, philosophy, politics and economics.

And turned out to be so utterly useless at all those things… 

Yet reading fiction is a fantastic preparation for life, for understanding people and the times through which we live. Novels encourage empathy, they help you to stand in other people’s shoes, to navigate complicated, sometimes conflicting emotions, they entertain and bring joy.

I agree! 

However, there has been a marked decline over recent years in the numbers of children reading for pleasure.

Wonder why? 

In 2025, the educational charity End Sexism in Schools released a report – Manopolies – revealing that 76% of students study An Inspector Calls by JB Priestley for their modern text from a possible 21 modern texts (a play, wonderful as it is, that’s been on one board’s set text list for 39 years). Then a whopping 93% of students study either A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens or The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson for their 19th-century novel from nine possible texts (including Charlotte Brontë, Mary Shelley and Jane Austen). Only 5% of students in England and Wales study a female-authored text at GCSE.

Oh, that’s why! Nothing kills the desire to read a book for pleasure as thoroughly as white middle class liberals demanding you read one that ticks an ‘equality’ box. And they think they can encourage kids to do it by forcing them into the curriculum. 

It’s true that there are diverse modern works by inspirational women on the lists of the four exam boards – Kit de Waal, Tanika Gupta, Jeanette Winterson, Malorie Blackman are all offered. The problem is that schools are disincentivised to change the texts they teach as this would involve costs and additional work.

And so, 'The Guardian' decides to ask modern authors to pick books which will 'inspire a lifelong love of reading' and so should be set as school texts. Let's read some of the blurbs to see why, eh, Reader?  

Wouldn’t it be refreshing to see a blisteringly funny novel on the syllabus? The Trees is a daring satire on racism, generational guilt and cultural complicity, inspired by the lynching of Emmett Till.

Emmet Till is a black man who was lynched in the Deep South of America in 1955, and so bears as much relationship to the lives of modern black children in the UK as Nanook of the North. 

I recommend this play. For a Black working-class London family, it’s a normal weekday – until the teenage son is senselessly stabbed and killed.

Well, it’s gritty and urban, and realistic, but do children want to read about something so familiar to their lives? I thought the point was to ‘walk in someone else’s shoes’? 

This wise, chaotic, gentle, painful, funny, superb novel follows five teens trying to navigate the most difficult year of their lives, while the town’s cool indie kids are battling Stranger Things-sized perils in vignettes at the start of each chapter. It contains some of the truest (and helpful) lines about social anxiety I’ve ever read.

 Great, giving kids 'social anxiety' to read about to ensure more kids believe themselves to be victims. Why the need to ban the internet if the schools are going to spread popular social contagions instead?

In those two exam years, my daughter studied not one female prose writer, not one writer of colour, only four female characters in the entire trio of set texts (if you count Macbeth’s witches as individual characters, which is debatable, oh and a female pig, according to one teacher).

Your daughter has a virtue-signalling fool for a mother - let her read what she needs to without checking it against a politically correct purity test first. Female and black characters don't automatically make a work of literature better just because someone on the Internet said so!

One of the weaknesses of the literary education of this country is that students are not exposed early in life to the valuable literatures of non-European people, particularly Africans.

If they really were valuable, we'd all be able to name one. I can't, can you Reader?  

And Why Should It Have?

Oliver and his publisher, Penguin Random House UK (PRH UK), have conceded to Guardian Australia that no consultation with any Indigenous organisation, community or individual took place before the book was published.

It's a children's fantasy novel. Why on earth should anyone have to consult anyone before publication? Except maybe a test audience of children, to see if they like it?

But let the reflexing cringing begin!

“I am devastated to hear I have caused offence and wholly apologise for doing so,” Oliver said in a statement to the Guardian. “I am listening and reflecting and working closely with my publisher on next steps.”

Oh, good grief, man, show some balls and tell the race grifters to fuck off! 

PRH UK also issued a statement saying it apologised unreservedly.

“Penguin Random House UK publishes this work and takes responsibility for the consultation, or what we would call an authenticity read of the work,” the statement said. “It was our editorial oversight that this did not happen. It should have and the author asked for one and we apologise unreservedly.”

And that's why you will be forever beholden to these charlatan activists! 

Neither author nor publisher has committed to withdrawing the book from sale, however, a move Natsiec said must happen immediately to rectify the harm caused. The body’s chief executive, Sharon Davis, said the book perpetuated harmful stereotypes, trivialised complex and painful histories and “ignores the violent oppression of First Nations people, raising serious concerns about the cultural safety of First Nations readers – especially young people”.

If your 'young people's' safety is compromised by reading a book, then their parents have failed them. 

Davis said such errors exposed the author’s “complete disregard for the vast differences among First Nations languages, cultures, and practices”, while the book’s reduction of First Nations beliefs and spirituality to “magic” was “a longstanding stereotype that diminishes our complex and diverse belief systems”.

Readers are invited to ponder the chutzpah here, give the furore over the Aboriginal Telescope that David Thompson highlighted. 

Dr Anita Heiss, a Wiradyuri author and publisher-at-large at Simon & Schuster’s First Nations imprint, Bundyi Publishing, said Oliver’s book confirmed what she had been advocating for over many years. “First Nations peoples need to be involved at every stage of the process from acquisitions to editorial, to sales and marketing. Only then will our stories be told with the complete respect they deserve,” she said in a statement. “There is no space in Australian publishing (or elsewhere) for our stories to be told through a colonial lens, by authors who have little if any connection to the people and place they are writing about.”

It's called 'fantasy' for a reason! Do  we have to strap Neal Asher to the next one of Musk's rockets so  he can write about sci fi? Lock Stephen King in a haunted house in Maine so he can write more horror? 

No, of course not. 

Creeping Wokism

It's really creeping in everywhere, now. Reading a review of 'The Rings Of Power' in an online blogsite from the US publisher Tor books, I came across these examples:

Bear in mind I'd come here to have a read of what someone else thought of a fantasy tv show, in a fantasy literature-focussed online magazine. 

I'd expected critique of the writing, direction and faithfulness to the source material. But instead, I got the same old tired woke nonsense I get from everywhere else. 

Which is probably why, scanning down any list of new sci-fi or fantasy literature coming out, especially ones for the 'young adult' audience, the words 'queer' or 'trans' leap out at you. A lot. 

A culture that can't breed new members must, after all, find a way to recruit them.

Which Schools, Joanne..?

Harris, who taught in an all-boys school for 15 years, said “the way we educate our children” must change if we wanted to see fewer crimes against women. 

She said: “We have to stop girls being apologetic when they have done nothing wrong. We have to stop boys being entitled when they’re actually not entitled to have more than anybody else. We’ve got to stop teaching them differently as teachers, that will help a lot.

“Also we’ve got to stop giving them the message that it’s wrong for a boy to read books about girls. Because even schools are giving them this message. And this is where the problem happens, where women’s voices are perceived as less.”

I mean, if you don't name any (and in these modern times, what school would dare give such a message?) we might think you're just talking absolute bollocks, mightn't we? 

 

 

As Cults Go, It's Rather Innocuous....

Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett on the latest thing that makes you one of the 'smug middle classes':

The big book purge began when I decided to go through the shelves and discard any book I was vaguely embarrassed to have in the house, for reasons of quality, subject matter, politics or author (look at your shelves and you probably have your own equivalents). Since then, I’ve been jettisoning them every few months with no regrets. Only twice have I needed to look something up in a book I’ve thrown away, and rebought a cheap secondhand copy.

Budgeting in her household must be fun... 

The poster shows a cat and bears the slogan: “THAT’S WHAT I DO, I READ BOOKS, I DRINK TEA AND I KNOW THINGS.” Apologies if you own this poster, but to me it encapsulates everything that is smug and middle class about the cult of book ownership. I don’t mean reading – provided you’re lucky enough to still have a local library, that is a pastime that is accessible to almost everyone. No, I specifically mean having a lot of books and boasting about it, treating having a lot of books as a stand-in for your personality, or believing that simply owning a lot of books makes one “know things”.

God, the 'Guardian' really is an awful rag, isn't it?