“to maintain the quality of literature is to keep the human”
Shak Chung Shan, qq.com, 20 Mar 2010, http://bit.ly/b6wfPS
- I have recently welcomed a Chinese lady into the family as an in law. She uses social networking like many people do, and she uses one of the biggest and most popular content portals in China, qq.com. So I duly pointed my browser in the direction of China, found it all to be in Chinese, and used google to translate it. It was much like Yahoo is here in the West, accept, amongst News, Cars, Dating, Celebrities and adverts, I noticed a part of the website for ‘Reading’ (and not hidden away either, right at the very top). On this page I found a vibrant reading community, with links to pages on all the fiction genera, non-fiction subjects as well, authors, books, and articles. The above quote was the title of one of the articles as it translated. It is nice to be reminded that there is a relationship between the quality of the literature in our culture and how human we are, and also that the reader along with writer, publishers, bookshops, libraries etc. all play their part in maintaining this quality and our culture. It was nice also to see some of our paradigm and values so close to popular culture. It is from our philosophy and understanding of ourselves and the world we live in that we can begin to make expectations and start to plan.
“A springboard story has an impact not so much through transferring large amounts of information, as through catalyzing understanding…”
The Springboard: How Storytelling Ignites Action in Knowledge-Era Organizations (KMCI Press), Stephen Denning, http://bit.ly/a6uRiw
"...book culture, a culture centred on ideas and a long, thoughtful conversation about life, love, politics, philosophy and what it means to be human."
FairfaxDigital, 13 September, 2007, Leave the antibooks on the shelf, http://bit.ly/d8bRGY
"...But mostly, public libraries deal in stories—the narratives that enlighten, entertain and communicate knowledge and wisdom ... Stories are how we communicate who we are, where we’ve been, what we’ve accomplished. Stories communicate our dreams, our fantasies, our hopes. Stories are, to a great extent, what makes us human."
WebJunction, 5 March, 2007, The Storied Library, http://bit.ly/aWacna
"'If you don't know the trees, you may become lost in the forest. But if you don't know the stories, you may become lost in life.' - Anonymous"
Hampstead Public Library, Welcome to Hampstead Public Library, http://bit.ly/czdFao
"it is our imaginations which shape us, keep us, create us ... our stories that will recreate us, when we are torn, hurt, even destroyed"
Guardian Unlimited, 8 December, 2007, A hunger for books, http://bit.ly/btJC1c
"Literature interprets the world"
TIME, 21 January, 2009, Books Unbound, http://bit.ly/XRyB
|