The Full Moon, The Imagination & The Books That Stay 🌕📚

There is something rather special about a book. You can hold one in your hands, open it at almost any page and suddenly find yourself somewhere else, somewhere you have never been, inside someone else’s imagination, learning about a life you have never lived, discovering an idea you had never considered, or perhaps simply finding a little piece of yourself.

And yet, in a world filled with screens, notifications, endless scrolling and something new demanding our attention every few seconds, it can feel as though we have forgotten how wonderful it is simply to sit down and read. As a school librarian, I see this every day. I see children surrounded by books, but also surrounded by so many other things competing for their attention. It makes me wonder whether, as adults, we sometimes need to remind ourselves too: reading isn't something we should have to force ourselves to do. Reading can be a pleasure.

It can be curiosity, escape, discovery and comfort. It can be a conversation with someone we have never met, perhaps from another country, another culture or another century. It can introduce us to a completely different way of seeing the world, or it can help us understand something that has always been sitting inside our own minds. A book can make us laugh, make us question something, teach us something or simply give us a quiet moment away from everything else.

Go All In 📖

2026 is the UK's National Year of Reading, with a wonderfully simple invitation: Go All In. I love this because it doesn't have to mean reading everything, or even reading what somebody else tells you that you should be reading. It can simply mean going all in on something that genuinely interests you. If you love football, read about football. If you love cooking, discover recipes and cookbooks. If you are fascinated by animals, read about them. If space captures your imagination, pick up a book about the universe. If you love stories, lose yourself in a novel. If history makes you curious, discover the people and events that shaped the world before us. If music is your thing, explore the stories behind the songs and the people who created them.

Whatever you're into, read into it.

Perhaps this is how we can find our way back to the pleasure of reading. We don't necessarily need to find an enormous block of free time or decide that we are suddenly going to read for an hour every evening. Reading can happen in those little pockets of time that appear throughout our day — a few pages before bed, a book alongside our morning coffee, something to read on a journey, a chapter while the children are playing, a Saturday afternoon in the library or one of those spare moments when our first instinct might normally be to reach for our phone. Instead, we could reach for a book and allow ourselves to see where it takes us.

Because sometimes the little pockets of time become the moments we remember.

Libraries belong to all of us 🏛️

If you haven't visited your local library recently, perhaps this is your invitation. Walk through the doors and have a look around without necessarily knowing what you are looking for. Pick something up simply because the cover caught your eye. Ask the librarian for a recommendation. Take your children and let them wander between the shelves. Let them choose something you wouldn't necessarily have chosen for them. There is something wonderful about allowing curiosity to lead the way.

Libraries are so much more than buildings filled with books. They are places where ideas can be shared freely, where children can discover new worlds without needing to buy them, where curiosity is welcomed and where generations can meet through stories. In a world where so much is available instantly through a screen, there is something wonderfully human about walking through shelves, finding something that speaks to you and taking a book home.

A legacy of imagination 💗

And this week, I want to honour someone whose name has become inseparable from the gift of books and imagination: Dolly Parton.

In 1995, Dolly created Dolly Parton's Imagination Library, inspired by her father's inability to read and write. What began in her home community grew into something extraordinary: a programme providing free, high-quality, age-appropriate books to children from birth to age five, delivered directly to their homes every month. The programme has grown far beyond its beginnings, reaching children across five countries and delivering more than 300 million books.

What a legacy. Not simply a legacy of music, and not simply a legacy of entertainment, but a legacy of giving children imagination. A legacy of putting a book into the hands of a child and opening a door to somewhere they might never otherwise have discovered. It is the belief that every child deserves the opportunity to experience stories, language, ideas and the simple magic of turning a page.

Perhaps that is one of the greatest gifts we can give a child: the chance to imagine, to wonder, to ask questions, to dream beyond what they already know and to discover that there are countless ways of seeing the world. A book can quietly say to a child, there is more out there, and you are welcome to explore it.

Dolly's legacy is a beautiful reminder that sometimes the greatest things begin with something incredibly simple. One book. One child. One imagination. And then another, and another, until something that began as a small act of kindness becomes something that reaches millions.

Under the Full Moon 🌕

And today, as we find ourselves beneath the light of August's Full Moon, there is an even more beautiful connection. This isn't just any Full Moon; the night of 27–28 August brought a deep partial lunar eclipse, as the Moon passed through Earth's shadow, with around 96% of its disc entering the darkest part of that shadow.

There is something poetic about that timing. The Moon itself reminds us that even when part of its light is hidden, the light is still there. And perhaps reading can do something similar for us. In a busy, noisy world, books give us a place to slow down, to look beyond what is immediately in front of us and to let our own inner light and imagination have some room to grow.

And so, beneath this month's Full Moon, it feels like the time to remember something simple: books will never go out of date.

Technology will change. Screens will change. The way we communicate will change. The world around us will continue to change, perhaps faster than we can sometimes keep up with. But people will always have stories to tell, questions to ask, ideas to share, theories to explore, mistakes to learn from, dreams to imagine and experiences to pass from one generation to the next.

That is why books matter. Reading doesn't simply fill our minds with somebody else's thoughts; it can inspire us to form our own. We can read an idea and question it. We can read a story and imagine another ending. We can discover something new and suddenly become curious about something completely different. We can learn from another person's experience and begin to see our own world from a slightly different perspective.

Perhaps that is the true magic of reading: one person's imagination can become the spark for another person's.

A writer imagines something, puts it into words and gives it to us. We then take those words and create our own pictures, thoughts and feelings from them. No two people necessarily experience the same book in exactly the same way, because every reader brings their own imagination and experiences to the pages. In that sense, every book becomes a meeting place between one person's ideas and another person's mind.

So, let's read📚

Not because we have to, and not because someone has told us that we should, but because there is still so much to discover. Find a book that genuinely interests you. Visit your local library. Read a few pages. Read to a child. Let a child read to you. Pick up something completely outside your usual interests. Put the phone down for ten minutes and open a book. You never know what thought, question, story or idea might begin there.

Because the world may be changing faster than ever, but our need to wonder, imagine, learn and dream isn't going anywhere. And neither are books.

So here's to the little moments spent reading, the little questions that become big ideas, the little stories that become lifelong memories and the little imaginations that can become extraordinary futures. Here's to the librarians, teachers, parents, grandparents, authors, illustrators and everyone else who continues to put books into the hands of children and believes in everything that might grow from there.

And here's to Dolly Parton, whose extraordinary legacy reminds us what can happen when we believe that giving a child a book is giving them far more than something to read. We are giving them a world to enter, a voice to discover, a question to ask and an imagination that can take them anywhere.

Go All In. Read into what you love. Keep asking questions. Keep discovering. Keep imagining. The little things become everything. ✨