Don’t judge me. Over the past few weeks, I have been resurfacing books from my past as I fill the bookshelves of my new flat.

Here is Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry, The Ka of Gifford Hillary by Dennis Wheatley, Kathy Acker’s Blood and Guts in High School, Hunter S Thompson’s The Great Shark Hunt, The Color Purple by Alice Walker, Lightning by Dean Koontz, Jeanette Winterson’s Sexing the Cherry, and the beloved Love Is a Dog from Hell by the poet and all around bad influence, Charles Bukowski.

As I said, don’t judge me. These are the books that made me – for good and ill. As Bukowski almost once wrote, this is the writing that saved me from everything that was not there.

I was reminded of all this after absorbing the Reading Rights report into the nation’s book health, led by the Waterstones Children’s Poet Laureate Frank Cottrell-Boyce and put together by BookTrust with Arts Council England funding. “Books Build a Brighter Future” is the strapline, and the report calls for national provision so that every child has access to books and reading from their earliest years. It wants national and local leaders in early years, health, education and culture to come together to make reading a part of daily life for every child in their first seven years.

The report argues that there is not just a reading crisis among our children, but a mental health one too, with books providing the building blocks that help us grow and then endure. As the author Patrice Lawrence writes in her foreword: “Books cannot be eaten or provide a physical refuge or home, but they can be a tool promoting empathy, escapism and reassurance.”

While the Reading Rights report is about future readers, there is a role too for older ones, either in modelling good habits, or just speaking openly about the books that inspired us. Like many in the trade, I do not come from a family of readers, so I know with some certainty that it was Susan Cooper and the less well-known Robert Newman who got me here.

The report argues that there is not just a reading crisis among our children, but an empathy one too

At the International Booker Prize this week, the former publisher and now author Max Porter talked too about the potency of words – in this case, words that travel to connect us with people and their stories from further afield.

As Porter put it on the  night: “Translated literature is a way of communicating over a border, under a wall, beyond an algorithm’s reach. We therefore need it, more than ever – those of us who believe in the migration of people, languages, ideas and feelings.”

Porter too took aim at UK prime minister Keir Starmer over his ill-judged language around migration. “His word choice means that nobody can miss the ideas, where he’s borrowing them from and what they will mean in practice. If this were fiction, no editor in the room would allow such a caricatured assault on subtlety, truth, morality or meaning.”

Starmer, of course, is infamous for failing to name a favourite book or poem when asked by the Guardian. I wonder if the Reading Rights report is actually pointing at a problem that we are already seeing play out in our public sphere. Where are the MPs who look into their own origin stories to unearth the backlist books that shaped them? None on the front bench, from what I see, and none among the opposition neither. This right to read that we all once enjoyed comes with a responsibility to pass it on. We used to be called a nation of shopkeepers. But that moment has gone. The job now is to become an island, not of strangers, but of readers.