Hi! Welcome to the blog of Ellie Joyce!

Like Young Eagle Rising, this blog is also aimed at young adults. Some of you might be interested in writing, which is brilliant, (in the following blogs I'll try and share some tips with you), while others may have ended up on this blog by accident while looking for something else. If so, then the topic of today's blog - why many young people don't read - might interest you. You may be one of them. Whoever you are, I'm delighted you could join me.

I have a lot of sympathy with young people who don’t read. As a young adult I didn't read anything other than the necessary school books. The problem was that I didn't know what to read. Most topics didn't interest me. I was bored by page five. That, in turn, left me unable to see the appeal of reading. Why did people gush about books?

Then one day I had a eureka moment (eureka being an ancient Greek word which means, 'I have it! coined by Archimedes who was pretty hot on, amongst other things, maths, science and astronomy. See what reading can do?) Well, my eureka moment happened when I came across a book about Ernest Shackleton. Who was he? Well, Shackleton was a polar explorer who led three expeditions to the Antarctic. I read the first chapter and was hooked. The courage and endurance of this man was spectacular - how he rescued his men from a place in the Antarctic called Elephant Island is the stuff of legends. Forget Frodo Baggins' quest - Shackleton's journey was equally fraught- and true.

I very quickly realised this is what I'd been searching for; anything that offered a glimpse of history and adventure. Inspired by Shackleton, I began to read about Robert Falcon Scott who - well, I'll not spoil it for you. Then about Edmund Hillary, who climbed Everest. From there I branched into true tales of the world wars and those who survived the concentration camps. I read about a geisha and the Chinese cultural revolution, the 1917 Russian revolution and the Romanovs....... I had found my niche. So, you see, it's all a question of finding what you like, be it sport, costume/style, the moons around Saturn, ocean exploration or Jane Austen (yes, classic stuff, but actually her books are brilliant - did you know Bridget Jones is a modern take on Pride and Prejudice?).

The thing is, it doesn't matter what you read, as long as you read something. And take heart, I was a very late starter, which goes to show we can all get there in the end.