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Al-Ahram Weekly 17 - 23 June 1999 Issue No. 434 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 17 - 23 June 1999 Issue No. 434
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Profile Features Living Travel Sports Time Out Chronicles People Cartoons Letters Plain talk
By Mursi Saad El-Din
It was in 1995 that the UNESCO declared Shakespeare's birthday as World Book Day. Member countries were expected to celebrate with competitions, prize draws, readings and book signing by authors. All over Britain those events were organised by schools, bookshops and libraries. Newspapers offered book vouchers to their readers, both children and adults.
World Book Day supported the charity Book Aid International, which sends relevant books to libraries and schools in the developing world, including Africa, the Pacific Islands, the Caribbean and South East Asia. What is really significant about this charity event is the way children are involved. So far they have raised LE50,000 in sponsored events, enough to send 55,000 books overseas. Hundreds of British schools participated.
The theme of the World Book Day was "Give a Book", and bookshops had Book Aid Book Bin where books were donated.
This is one of the many efforts to encourage reading both among children and grown-ups. I have previously written about the National Year of Reading in Britain, 1999, and the steps the Department of Education has taken to supply schools with books.
On the occasion of World Book Day a number of English writers published articles in support of reading. One of them is Fay Weldon, a novelist, who describes reading as a long-term addiction. "I started as a reader, not a writer," she asserts, confirming the fact that, for most writers, reading tends to precede writing. "They end up writing the novel they want to read," Weldon concludes, "if only because nobody else got round to writing it."
Books are better than Prozac as tranquilisers. Reader escalates to writer -- user to dealer, to use the drug language. Weldon gives her recipe on how reading creates the writer. There is no point in hurrying, as the writer needs to know a thing or two. What the writer should do is to take real life, heighten it, cut out the boring bits, and offer an explanation. But this takes time. Besides, the writer needs the services of other writers. One's life experience is not enough. A writer enriches his or her life with the experience of other writers, which means with books. Weldon believes that, while some people are obsessive about cinema, films are just a lazy reader's way of getting a story into the head. Films drift out again so fast. "There's no act of creative complicity here", she says. The theatre is not bad but "books are best."
She then goes on to trace her love of reading, which started when she was three, with Mumfie the Elephant, and developed with books like those of Robert Louis Stevenson and Joseph Conrad. She became obsessed with reading. She read walking to school, at the dinner table, in bed with a torch. "It wasn't really possible to read while cycling," she says, "although I tried."
It was in early 1970 that she wrote the novel she wanted to read -- one which reflected the reality of the world and not its myth. But all the time, producing one novel after another, she kept reading. Myths changed, however. "Yesterday's truth is today's myth". If contemporary novelists hark back to the past or look ahead to the future, she is not surprised. "The present is a hard nut to crack."
