School Book Club Members Suggest Some Good Reads
One of our PDA options this term is Journalism, run by Miss Merritt. Students from different year groups across school are busy creating designs for their own student newspaper, interviewing staff and students in different PDA sessions, and generating articles for inclusion. Sixth Form students, Daniel, Lucy and Aster have taken on the role of Editors, pulling together the first edition as well as trying their own hand at writing.
Aware that 2026 has been designated the Year of Reading, their first piece is about the staff book club. So if you need some inspiration either for your own reading, or maybe even in starting your own book club, they’ve also included some reading recommendations to get you started. Our thanks to them for this article:
“2026 is the National Year of Reading. The Government recently announced a scheme to encourage all ages to engage with reading. Currently, research suggests that only one third of eight-to eighteen-year olds enjoy reading. A potential cause of this decline in our passion for books is the growing issue of screen time. Did you know that children under five with over five hours of screen time per day can produce less words than those with less than one hour? This has encouraged the Government to take action and provide guidance on how much screen time we should be consuming.
Book clubs are a way of making reading fun! We were inspired to conduct research into Malton School’s staff book club in hopes of finding out what they do and how you can do it yourselves. They believe that reading is important because it ‘unlocks critical skills’ and ‘so much of the world is unavailable to you’ without literacy. They also told us that reading helps to ‘take you outside your own world’ and can help with ‘escapism’. When we asked why book clubs are important, they told us that they create ‘community, where you can share your views and become open to new ideas. This helps to ‘open up different perspectives’ and ‘broaden [your] horizons’, allowing you to explore books you ‘wouldn’t have read otherwise’. This shows that reading has the potential to create change and enhance learning outside of school. A variety of books can be accessed through our school library or the local library in Malton. Starting a book club can make reading into a social activity and, since 2026 is the National Year of Reading, why not start your reading journey today? To help you start, the staff and editors have shared their favourite books:
Miss Cassedy – ‘Jamaica Inn’ by Daphne du Maurier
Miss Gray – ‘Frankenstein’ by Mary Shelley
Mrs Blacker – ‘The Old Man and the Sea’ by Ernest Hemingway
Mrs Stockdale – ‘Bone Crack’ by Dick Francis
Mrs Duke- ‘Hamnet’ by Maggie O’Farrell
(Sixth Form Student) Danie l- ‘Fire and Blood’ by George R.R Martin
(Sixth Form Student) Lucy – ‘Panchinko’ by Min Jin Lee
(Sixth Form Student) Aster – ‘A Single Man’ by Christopher Isherwood
