US Edition 
Some children just don't like reading, says Guess How Much I Love You author
Reading and writing are a matter of temperament, says Sam McBratney, who has sold 30 million copies of his most famous book
Parents shouldn't worry if their children seem uninterested in reading, the globally bestselling children's author Sam McBratney has suggested. Literary inclination, he said, is down to temperament.
McBratney, who wrote Guess How Much I Love You, the 1994 picture book that has sold 30 million copies worldwide, explained that he has noticed that reading is something some children just won't take to, regardless of input from parents.
Speaking at the Hay Festival, he said: "One of the things I've noticed dealing with children and raising my own children is, no matter how much you put books in their way, they won’t necessarily take them."
"But, on the other hand," he continued, "there are children who, no matter how much you try to keep them from books, they find a way to read.
"It’s a matter of temperament.
"When I was a child we didn't really have many books around the house," he said. "My staple diet of reading when I was growing up, from 9 onwards, was a writer of American Westerns called Zane Grey, because my father bought those and left them around the house. Equally, I was reading stories from People's Friend, and I began reading romances. I would read anything."
McBratney, 72, added that when he was a child in the late 1940s, his brother and he would "rather have been given a banana than a book".
Guess How Much I Love You is McBratney's most successful book - when it was published by Walker Books it sold 150,000 copies in four months - but before that was published, he had written 56 others. He has been invited by his publishers to buy back many of those, and others he has written since. He joked that his house in Northern Ireland is a "mausoleum" to nearly 90 books.
The Irish author said he "just feels so humble" that so many readers have used Guess How Much I Love You to help with issues such as bereavement. "I'm pleased that I've done something like that."
"At times it's a wee bit overwhelming to see how people say they have used the book."
"But then I have to remind everybody: this is just a story, for a big one to read to a little one at bedtime."