This year, she offered a few festive season buying tips. ''When you think of Christmas this year, give the gift that will keep on giving,'' she said. ''For children, may I suggest giving a good book?'' Rinehart related her childhood favourites, including The Little Red Hen, and the Norah of Billabong series (personal toil and initiative) and for older kids, her recommendations included free-market friendly Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman who taught her ''there is no such thing as a free lunch''.

I loved reading as a kid, so a few years ago I volunteered for a program to help kids struggling to read. I imagined sitting with a beautifully illustrated book resting on my knee, while my captivated audience of little people surrounded me. They'd take turns to read the prose aloud, delight beaming from their faces.

Alas, it didn't pan out that way. I was assigned to a year 3 student (let's call him Bob) who was, like all the kids in the program, well behind the literary standard expected at his age. Each week, we'd work through some word exercises together. In the last 15 minutes, Bob was supposed to read a book aloud that he'd brought with him. To say he was unenthusiastic about this part of the session is an understatement. We'd been warned in the training that our charges might be reticent about reading, but I was still shocked by how challenging it was to keep Bob's attention on the page for more than two sentences.

Bob soon cottoned on that if he didn't bring his ''reader'' into our session, he could spend at least five minutes of his read-aloud time browsing the library bookshelves, searching for the perfect book. So I watched as he strolled from the A's to Z's of authors, stealing a glance at me occasionally and sighing when his favourite book was out on loan. Despite his performance, Bob always ended up in front of the ''G's'', where he plucked whatever Andy Griffiths book was there.