Reader development is a hot topic across the UK – there are around 50,000 reading groups that are meeting at schools, libraries, bookshops and homes, fuelled by a desire to read and to discuss books in an informal and relaxed atmosphere.

Reader development means active intervention to:

• increase people’s confidence and enjoyment of reading
• open up reading choices
• offer opportunities for people to share their reading experience
• raise the status of reading as a creative activity

A reader-centred approach emphasises the quality of the reading experience rather than the quality of the book.

The reader-centred reading group:

• respects everybody's individual reading experience
• makes no assumptions about what people have already read, their knowledge of literary theory or who said what in last Sunday's papers
• enables people with different reading preferences to talk to each other on common ground
• encourages honest exploration of responses instead of a pressure to perform
• accommodates varying levels of time commitment and reading appetite

The aim is not just to understand the book better but to understand what the experience was for other readers in order to illuminate our own.

“So what is going on when we read? Far from being an act of passive consumption, where the reader absorbs the writer’s words like a sponge, reading in itself is a creative process. No two people read the same text in the same way. Everyone brings their own set of expectations, experiences and viewpoints; what occurs is a DIALOGUE between reader and writer, what emerges is a CHANGED PERSON. We take what a writer gives us and we make it our own. We do not only gain knowledge from reading, we acquire emotional depth and subtlety of response.” (Demos, Creative Reading by John Holden, 2004)