There’s a bit in The Hobbit where Bilbo watches as his dwarf companions narrowly escape becoming dinner for three ugly trolls. It’s a fabulous piece of storytelling. The trolls – Tom, Bert and William – are busy bickering over how they’re going to cook the dwarfs, and with some clever voice trickery the wizard Gandalf keeps them arguing until the sun comes up, which turns them all to stone. I have vivid memories of my dad reading that scene when I was little, putting on the different rough cockney voices (Tolkien tells us the trolls’ language was “not drawing-room fashion at all, at all”) and making Gandalf impersonate them, so it came as a delightful surprise when the deception was revealed.
I’ve returned to The Hobbit a dozen times since, but the magic of that moment doesn’t quite translate when you’re reading it silently in your head. Then last year, I heard Tom, Bert and William squabbling once again. My husband was reading it to his daughters, cockney accents and all. They were just as fearful for the dwarfs, and just as elated when they were saved by Gandalf’s trick. In that instant, magic was restored.
This is the threefold power of reading to children. There’s the wonder the first time they hear the story, the pleasure they get from reading it themselves when they’re old enough, then the joyful nostalgia when they come, years later, to read it to a child of their own. And in-between, an entire bibliophilic universe opens up.
If you were read to before you were old enough to remember it, this probably sounds very obvious. At one end of the scale, I have a friend who started reading Jane Austen to her newborn, on the grounds that it would get the baby used to the cadences of storytelling and be much less mind-numbing for her than the usual infant fare. But at the other, the trends are not good. A 2025 survey by the book data company NielsenIQ and publisher HarperCollins, found just 41 per cent of children aged zero to four are frequently read to, down from 64 per cent in 2012. This means that most children are beginning school with reading as an alien concept.
Step in Dolly Parton. In 1995 the esteemed country singer launched the Imagination Library, inspired by her father, who couldn’t read or write. Along with helping to fund the Moderna Covid vaccine, it’s the most incredible thing she ever did. The programme sends a free book each month to every child who signs up until their fifth birthday. It has delivered 300 million books all over the world, and on 22 September, a month after Parton’s death, it was announced the scheme would be expanding in the UK, widening access to 157,000 more children.
The books themselves are lovely, but that’s not the point. Books are relatively cheap to acquire, from charity shops or libraries, even for low-income families. The barriers are more complicated: time, habit, enjoyment. The NielsenIQ survey found that just 40 per cent of parents thought reading to their children was fun, while 35 per cent of parents surveyed by the Book Trust charity said they don’t enjoy reading full stop. Celebrity glamour won’t fix that, but it does elevate the importance of literacy. A book from the Imagination Library isn’t just a book – it’s a gift sent by global superstar Dolly Parton. That’s got to be worth reading. The parent gets a fragment of Dolly’s sparkle; the child gets a whole new world.
I doubt The Hobbit is on the list of available titles, as it’s somewhat ambitious for under-fives, but I’ve been told by my husband to stress that doing the voices is non-negotiable whatever the work. Doctors always have Edinburgh accents, and at least one character should be Welsh, even if they’re a Womble. Classics are classics for a reason, but fathers should be aware that they will cry at the end of The Railway Children and their kids will need to comfort them. The magic is in the forging of memory as much as the story itself – and it can last a lifetime. Just be wary of the final instalment of Mog the Forgetful Cat.
[Further reading: The Wargame is Michael Gove’s fantasy alternative universe]
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This article appears in the 01 Oct 2026 issue of the New Statesman, Sunshine and Rain
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