Reading Force, 2011: A new initiative for forces families

Reading Force, an imaginative new initiative designed to bring forces families and friends closer together, will be launched on 25 March 2011. As the organisers explain: ‘Forces families are regularly separated by training, by overseas postings, and experience frequent stresses and changes – and it’s often hard to feel part of a stable community. Reading Force will help keep everyone in touch. Reading, and talking about reading, brings families and communities closer together and improves confident communication for all ages.’

How Reading Force will work

Under the umbrella of the Reading Force project, forces families and friends from the local community will be encouraged to form reading groups consisting of between three and eight people of any age. Having decided on a book to read, once they’ve done so, the group members will each record their opinions of it on paper so that their thoughts can be pasted into a scrapbook, which can then be kept as a permanent record of their shared experience. More crucially, however, it will prompt them to start a conversation about what they’ve been reading, thus encouraging communication, which can easily be disrupted when a family member is serving overseas or is otherwise absent for prolonged periods.

Which books they decide to read is up to the reading groups, but the Reading Force organisers have suggested a number of titles that younger readers may enjoy as much as older ones. They include:

• How I Live Now, Meg Rosoff;
• Wreck of the Zanzibar, Michael Morpurgo;
• Angel, Lee Weatherly;
• The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, Mark Haddon;
• Voices in the Park, Anthony Browne;
• Steven Gerrard: My Story, Steven Gerrard;
• The Illustrated Mum, Jacqueline Wilson;
• Ferno the Fire Dragon, Adam Blade;
• Young Bond: Silverfin: A James Bond Adventure, Charlie Higson;
• Toast: The Story of a Boy’s Hunger, Nigel Slater;
• The Dark Beneath, Alan Gibbons;
• The Highwayman’s Footsteps, Nicola Morgan;
• Quick, Let’s Get Out of Here, Michael Rosen and Quentin Blake;
• Lord of the Flies, William Golding; and
• Noughts & Crosses, Malorie Blackman.

Benedicte Page’s article about Reading Force in the Guardian (‘Plan to bridge separation of service families with joint reading scheme’, 18 January 2011) explains why Alison Baverstock (who is a lecturer in publishing at Kingston University, the wife of a soldier and the project's mastermind) believes that Reading Force will help forces families:

Baverstock was inspired to create the scheme following her own experience of having her husband away on a tour of duty. The family, she found, struggled to relate to one another during phone calls because of the difference in their daily experiences. "When your husband rings up from Afghanistan or Iraq, you have a very limited time to talk, but sometimes you just don't know what to talk about," she said. "Your existence can seem quite humdrum in comparison to theirs – and you can't ask them what they are doing [because military details are secret]. Being able to talk about a book we're both reading is great because it gives us some common ground."

Preparations and prizes

The Reading Force organisers will be holding a project day on Saturday 5 March 2011 at the Connaught Community Centre, North Camp, Aldershot, to which anyone who would like to be involved is invited.

Pre-printed Reading Force scrapbooks will be handed out at schools to children from service families, and will also be available from HIVE information centres and local libraries.

There will be a Reading Force competition, too: completed scrapbooks can handed in (by 15 July 2011) to be judged by creative-writing and publishing staff at Kingston University, with prizes being awarded on 10 September 2011 by the children’s writer Alan Gibbons.

For more information, visit Kingston University’s website, and bookmark the Reading Force website – http://www.readingforce.org – which will be providing further details and advice about the project in due course.