![]() There seemed at once to be too many books to choose from and none that really felt like a proper match to accurately identify a potential market and audience for Muchafraid. My story is set in 13th-century Baghdad and includes the House of Wisdom, poetry and fantasy elements. When searching for titles to compare my novel Muchafraid to, I struggled. It’s really a way of going to the origin of the book,” said its co-curator Laurent Hericher, head of the Oriental manuscripts department at the Bibliotheque nationale de France.Īs an adult and as an author myself, the librarian and their domain remain an invaluable support. People inspect a Quran, a Torah and a Bible, part of the Letters of Light exhibition at Louvre Abu Dhabi on Monday. Department of Culture and Tourism – Abu Dhabi Rendering of Children’s Library next to Qasr Al Hosn in Abu Dhabi. Some of the oldest and rarest texts of the three monotheistic religions are on display. For example, the good people who run the Mohammed Bin Rashid Library in Dubai are working with publishers, institutions and authors to ensure that school libraries have a wide range of books for children in both English and Arabic.Įqually, the eternal value of reading is evident at a new exhibition in Louvre Abu Dhabi. I am grateful then that in the UAE, the trend seems to be the reverse of that in the UK. Unless we feed the love of literature at school, then there is a chance that children will grow up without a love of reading.” It is still shocking that libraries and librarians are not in every single school in the country. Horowitz, whose work includes the Alex Rider series, said of the UK: “Literacy will be in danger if we do not support libraries in schools. So you give kids the wrong books and they say they hate reading, when in fact they just didn’t like the book you gave them,” she said. Rosoff, who wrote How I Live Now, said: “The demise of libraries … means that there are no longer professional people who match kids with books. So it was alarming to me when Anthony Horowitz and Meg Rosoff, authors of young adult fiction, told The Times earlier this month that there needs to be more investment in school libraries after a UK survey suggested that half of those aged eight to 18 do not enjoy reading in their spare time. Yet the librarian could also quiet me with a stern look and I did not want to have to face the look of disappointment when they checked my record to see I still had failed to return an overdue book.Īlthough by peering at me, the librarian seemed to be able to discern like a water diviner exactly which book would captivate my growing mind, and for that they still mean so much and always will. ![]() If you needed help, they could guide you around the library’s catalogue with an intimacy of its contents that was greater than I had of my own home. The duality of that role seemed to me to be that they had to be both like a wizard and the police.īritish writer Anthony Horowitz worries about the dwindling number of libraries for children in the UK. Also, Netflix could never replicate the librarian, no matter how powerful its algorithm. But you have to pay to use Netflix, of course. These days, only the experience of Netflix comes close to that feeling of going to the library as a child and seeing the breadth and depth of the content available to choose. No money needed to change hands unless you fell foul of the dreaded late fees. Yet there was no jeopardy if the book you had chosen disappointed you simply returned it the next day and picked up another. I carried in my bag pieces of the history of the world or snapshots of great political figures and, of course, infinite stories written by brilliant authors and frankly, some mediocre ones, too. Taking home a book was like stealing away a whole world. I learnt about the hippopotamus and the life of Robin Hood actor Errol Flynn. The sections represented undiscovered territories waiting to be mined. The expression “Aladdin’s Cave” comes to mind, and I groan inwardly at the reference because it is at once both an accurate and overused description for a library. ![]() ![]() Cliches abound when I recall my earliest memories of visiting my local library.
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