Reading Lessons

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What to expect

Brought to you by Penguin.

An English teacher's love letter to reading and the many ways literature can make us, and our lives, better.


How can a Victorian poem help teenagers understand YouTube misogyny? Can Jane Eyre encourage us to speak out? What can Lady Macbeth teach us about empathy? Should our expectations for our futures be any greater than Pip’s? And why is it so important to make space for these conversations in the first place?

Over her twenty-five-year career, English teacher Carol Atherton has taught generations of students texts that will be familiar to many of us from our own schooldays. But while the staples of exam syllabuses and reading lists remain largely unchanged, their significance – and their relevance - evolves with each class as they encounter them for the first time.

Each chapter of Reading Lessons invites us to take a fresh look at these novels, plays and poems, revealing how they have shaped our beliefs, our values, and how we interact as a society. As she recalls her own evolution as a teacher, Atherton emphasises the vital, undervalued role teachers play, illustrates how essential reading is for developing our empathy, and makes a passionate case for the enduring power of literature.

©2024 Carol Atherton (P)2024 Penguin Audio

Critics Review

  • Beautifully written, sensitive and full of warmth. This is a thoughtful book that serves as a vital point of reflection for anyone who has taught, or been taught, English literature within the system. Carol has done the important job of creating space for conversation about what we teach and why we teach it, whilst also offering genuine insights on some of the most pressing issues facing educators today. Teachers will definitely find this book to be equally thought provoking and illuminating. I did.

    Jeffrey Boakye

  • Reading Lessons is many books in one: a fresh and frank memoir of almost three decades as a secondary school English teacher, a love letter to literature itself, and a compelling argument for why young people continue to need novels, poems and plays as the raw materials from which they can mould themselves and their wider understanding of the world. At a time when English is under attack as an academic subject, Carol Atherton’s powerful defence of it reminds us what we are in danger of losing.

    Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, author of The Turning Point

  • Generous, humane and constantly surprising. An urgent defence of the power of literature to create empathetic, interrogative citizens

    Emma Smith, author of Portable Magic: A History of Books and their Readers

  • ‘Essential … At a time when the importance of the arts in education is being eroded, Reading Lessons makes a powerful case for the study of literature. If you are in the job you are in because you loved literature at school – or even if you didn’t love it so much – this book is for you’

    Caroline Sanderson, The Bookseller

  • This exhilarating report from the educational frontline shows how literature can excite – but also perplex – young readers. Indeed, it shows how the excitement and the perplexity often belong together

    John Mullan, author of The Artful Dickens

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