The pros and cons of reading

I’ve always loved reading. The Famous Five fired my literary taste buds – my mum also read them during her childhood – so when I had my own children, it was natural to introduce them to the Five too. They devoured them.

In time, I passed on the set once cherished by my youngest to my oldest nephew, without much luck.

However, my sister’s 11-yearold had now stumbled across them, powered straight through every single one, and came back begging for more – addicted.

Perhaps then, teaching a child to love books is rather like being a drug dealer: you just need to find the right gateway drug and you’ve got them hooked.

Next we’re slipping him a little Harry Potter, then War and Peace.

But this got me to thinking about literary role models, because The Famous Five isn’t exactly modern in its gender portrayals. The boys are boys – a leader, his sidekick, a dog – but the girls, Georgina and Anne, are either unhappy at being female and so emulate boys (hence “George”), or they’re wimps whose dearest wish is to cook and clean (Anne).

Yes, you say, but Blyton is dead: The Famous Five was written in the 1940s.

Well, of course they are, but then perhaps they’re not:

It may be apocryphal that Harry Potter was not Harriet Potter because JK Rowling sensed that a book with a boy at its heart would do better than a book with a girl protagonist. It’s certainly not a myth that, in a study of 5 600 children’s books, male names featured in the titles of 36,5% of books, as opposed to 17.5% with female names.

At least JK gave us dauntless Hermione, though, because another study into gender disparity in 5 000 well-known books for children found that 25% had NO female characters whatsoever.

In addition, only 20% of the grown women featured were shown to have a job, compared to 80% of the men.

And Rowling was probably correct, too, when it comes to female protagonists: males are central to 57%of kids’ books, females to just 31%.

The rest feature animals, with male animals making up 23% of principals, while female critters lead the action in only 7.5%.

But perhaps most telling of all, when no gender is given research shows that we assume the animal is male.