Half the mothers I know despair that their children do not read, or do not read widely, or do not read exactly what their mothers liked reading at the same age. If you have ever had reading as a passion, if you have hidden or stolen or lied to be able to do it, it can be painful to see it regarded as an antiquated pursuit, colourless, embarrassing and quaint.

Many teenagers see reading as the pastime of the sad — sad in the modern sense meaning not to be envied. It’s a baffling personal habit as odd and outdated as, I don’t know, making your own shoe trees. It is what you might do if everything else in your life was a disaster, or you were.

Why do they not see the romance of it? I remember being with a friend when she returned the call of a man who was interested in her and asked him what he was doing.

“Just reading at home,” he said. We were so impressed. They are married now with four children.

Of course, not all that long ago, reading was seen as frittering your life away, self-indulgent, louche, one notch up from hanging around on street corners. It was also considered mildly transgressive, a way of finding things out that would turn you into an adult quicker, opening up your mind and your world to experiences far beyond your imagination.

“How can the teens be encouraged to read?” mothers ask themselves and each other. “She doesn’t read!” dads complain to mums. “But I was always with my head in a book,” grandmothers add.

The important thing is that the child is happy. She has lovely friends and keeps up at school. Think of what she does do, not what she doesn’t. But, in the middle of the night, the doubts come: if you never read Persuasion, can you have a happy life?

I do a straw poll of my happiest friends and it is true they have all read this delicate and rueful tale of love second time around. Though the unhappy ones have read it too. And the ones who have both good days and bad.

I have seen teenagers bribed to read and I have seen them threatened. I have heard that experts who ought to know better tell parents to exclaim at regular intervals in front of the children, “Gosh I am so enjoying my book.” I have seen mothers take cheer at the school gates, when they hear “Apparently so and so didn’t start reading until she was 15!” So there is hope. But some days this legendary late literary developer is 24. Other days 39.

Back in the world of in insomnia veritas (if that’s a phrase), you think what few joys life will bring if you’ve bypassed Chekhov’s short stories and don’t recall the genius of ‘Lady with Lapdog’ whenever you see a lady with a laptop. How much less colour in your day there will be if every time you hear someone ask a woman for her name, you do not think of Anne of Green Gables saying, “Would you mind calling me Cordelia?”

If you are face to face with a Sunday roast, I think it genuinely tastes more delicious if these lines from “The Wasteland” are on the tip of your tongue: “Well, that Sunday Albert was home, they had a hot gammon,/ And they asked me in to dinner, to get the beauty of it hot -”.

I know Othello killed his wife but I often think of his lines about Desdemona when wondering about how close relationships and deep friendships work: “She loved me for the dangers I had passed,/ And I loved her that she did pity them.”

We all know that getting ready for a party is sometimes the best bit of the evening but it is even better when you have, in the back of your mind, a scene like the one from ‘The Rose, The Mauve, The White’ by Elizabeth Taylor. Young girls preparing themselves for a party are dusting each other enthusiastically with talc, with one of the heroines “dredging Katie as thoroughly as if she were a fillet of fish being prepared for the frying pan”.

And no one who has read Jane Austen could ever make a joke at someone else’s expense on a picnic.

So you read to the teenagers yourself sometimes even though they’re almost old enough to get married. You tell them the stories of all your favourite books and poems. You play talking books. You watch the films together. And you are pleased for your pal when she tells you in ecstasies that her 14-year-old has fallen in love . . . with poetry. Round their kitchen table, it’s all late Emily Dickinson this and early Thomas Hardy that.

You are pleased, yes, and you are also brave.

— Financial Times