The following is a tidied up and edited version of an email to a member of staff working on reading groups, and essentially a followup to the upthread post, so I thought I'd post it.
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The post I mentioned, with lots of fiction related quotes can be found here:
http://bit.ly/asiuVE
And some more quotes:
"We read because we love ideas. We love sharing people's thoughts and dreams. We love to be inspired." The Avid Reader, April 2008[1]
"People wish also in the main, to give their fellows and themselves the opportunity for self-improvement. This wish is the vital fact at the bottom of the free, compulsorily supported public library. It is on these vital facts that we should keep our eyes and our thoughts, not on the feature of compulsion. Work then, for the extension of the public library from the starting-point of human sympathy, from the universal desire for an increase of human happiness by an increase of knowledge of conditions of human happiness" Library Daylight - Tracings of Modern Librarianship, 1874-1922, Edited Rory Litwin[2]
"Their [books'] values lies in enabling men to do, think, feel and understand better than they could if they depended solely on their individual experience and that of those with whom they were in immediate contact. Books can abolish time and distance. Some matters cannot be embraced in such forms of record; many skills and understandings can only be acquired by experience and practice. But a substantial part of the experience, achievement and wisdom of the past and the present can be made and is made available for all who have the ability and desire to use them." The purpose and values of a library service, Lionel R McColvin (1942)[3]
“There is then creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every page is doubly significant, and the sense of the author is as broad as the world. We then see what is always true…” Ralph Waldo Emerson – The American Scholar (1837)[4]
Literature raises a culture (the ideas and activities of a people), and as culture becomes richer so civilization should advance also (i.e., the degree to which the needs of the people of a civilization and society are met). The library raises the culture of the community served[5], the community's needs should be increasingly met. There is a theory that genetically we enjoy a good story[6], it’s in our genes, those of our ancestors that told stories enjoyed greater reproductive success than those that didn’t. If ‘Life is a Menu’[7] then for many many reasons (stories, sharing, culture, etc. - read almost any text on books and the values will pour out) we should certainly put a good book onto that menu. We can enjoy a book, and it is good for us as well. Reading adds to life's menu a pleasure in itself, while the economy should also improve as a culture becomes richer.
It is not though a lot of good having a rich literature if people don’t take advantage of it. Rachel Van Riel and the reader centred approach[8] (there is a chapter in Van Riel’s book The Reader-friendly Library Service on reading groups) makes a point of opening up reading choices for readers and improving the reading experience for the reader as a whole. Within our cultural/literary ecosystem we find publishers, bookshops, libraries and their staff, the writers and their literary art form, but most importantly as well are the readers: reading, but also talking and sharing[9] (and in this age of communications technologies we have more opportunity to talk and share than ever). Historically reading has tended to be overlooked (‘entertainment’) but its role and importance to the ecosystem as a whole and our culture cannot be overlooked. I'm sure reading groups prove every time they meet that they are a big plus for all of these values.
One final quote:
"the gift that you give the artist and that the artist gives you" Zadie Smith on the practice of reading[10]
The reader takes over from writer and becomes artist, while the writer's work of art begins its second all important genesis.
[1] http://bit.ly/cIEkyI
[2] http://bit.ly/bTMfzh
[3] http://bit.ly/bDFdk5
[4] http://bit.ly/bM4stc
[5] Copyright and wrong, http://bit.ly/aocogW
[6] This was either The Nature of Happiness by Desmond Morris or Happiness: The Science behind your smile by Daniel Nettle.
[7] Opening the Book, http://bit.ly/dgajOz
[8] Private Readers, Public Readers, http://bit.ly/cgFotf
[9] http://bit.ly/buvNxy
[10] http://bit.ly/cLGHZX
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Gareth Osler
Library Web
http://libraryweb.info
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