No nonsense ...

... Interview with Len Deighton. (Hat tip, Paul Davis.)

“My mother was a cook and my father was a chauffeur … One day he said to me, ‘I won’t punish you for the terrible reports you bring home from school if I see you reading.’ That really did push me into reading books. I played truant all the time and I usually went to the Marylebone Reference library and I would just sit there all day long and read. A terrible kind of sedentary childhood I had, when I think about it.

Now that's an unusual way to encourage a child to read.