I’VE A niece called Mary. She’s 18, and off to university soon.

Just before the EU Referendum I heard her debating the pros and cons of Brexit with a much-older relative, using precise facts and figures, deploying powerful arguments - and not backing down.

She’s a bright lass.

Like many of her generation, she knows her way around social media. There’s a constant stream of posts, pictures, and tweets from her, and probably lots more that would mean nothing to me.

The other night she was on a train, tweeting a grumble that a conversation behind her was distracting, she hadn’t any music to listen to and was bored.

‘Read a book!’ I tweeted back.

She didn’t have one with her, she said, I suppose because she was off on a night out and had left behind everything that wasn’t absolutely essential, such as pockets.

Knowing her, she’ll settle down to write one instead, and it’ll be a best-seller.

But I saw a statistic in last Sunday’s paper: apparently four million Brits never read books for pleasure, and another 12 million only do it about once a year, probably when they’re flying abroad for some sunshine.

How does that work? I’m always being asked if it rained on holiday because I never get a proper tan; face to the typeface all fortnight.

Or missing a train stop because my nose is stuck in a book - it happened once on the London Underground, reading Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queen. I’m beyond hope.

The August meeting of Airedale Writers’ Circle was a readers’ night, something we do occasionally in the summer when a lot of people are away.

Bring a favourite book, read and share a passage, tell everyone why it speaks to you.

It might be an old favourite, of which it’s nice to be reminded - we had extracts from PG Wodehouse, from James Herriot (‘He’s womiting bad, sorr.’), and a chilling reading of a World War One poem by Wilfred Owen from our youngest member. Or

It might be an unfamiliar author: we had a short story by Raymond Carver, and poems by Alison Chisholm.

Listening to them all, it’s plain that there’s no single way to get it right.

Some extracts worked because they were pared down to essentials, written with precision and economy. Others - particularly an extract from Jerome K Jerome’s Three Men In A Boat – work their magic by piling up detail upon detail until they go to absurd lengths.

We had much-loved, dog-eared volumes that had kept someone company for 50 years at one extreme; e-readers, iPads and smart phones at the other.

They all work that trick of telepathy and carry an idea from the writer’s head to the reader’s. More than that, though: they teach us about each other, about what it’s like to live in someone else’s skin, to feel their pain and share their joys.

Books make us more human. Remember that next time you’re on Facebook.