ON HER walk home from school every day, my daughter, Ijanaya, points out bookstores which have remained open as essential services in Antwerp, Belgium, during lockdowns. I smile and think: this is a caring and progressive place. I want the Government here to recognise that bookstores provide essential services.
If this sounds like a strange request, then you don't realise the power of books to offer comfort, support and intellectual stimulation. Books are also our best way to forget about covid19 and the restrictions it has placed on us. Perhaps reading a good survival story like Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage by Alfred Lansing would do the trick right now. Maybe this is the time to discover Herman Melville's Moby Dick at Project Gutenberg, which offers a library of e-books that are now in the public domain.
There's a top 100 downloaded book list on Project Gutenberg's site so readers like me who love book lists can see how book selections change by the day. Sites like this can help bibliophiles or even literary explorers, but there is still the need to have contact with our bookstores.
Last October when France faced another covid19 lockdown, the Guardian newspaper in England reported that French bookstore associations said, 'Leave our bookstores open so that social confinement does not also become cultural isolation. Our readers, who love independent bookstores, would not understand it and would experience it as an injustice…books satisfy our need for understanding, reflection, escape, distraction, but also sharing and communication.'
Books are academic lifelines for students right now, and reading has been proved to improve empathy skills, which are sorely lacking in this country.
When I last walked into Paper Based in the Normandie Hotel, the first display I saw happened to be a box set of West Indian biographies from the University of the West Indies Press. Reading these biographies on Beryl McBurnie, Earl Lovelace or Marcus Garvey can feel like having a private tutor for students trying to understand book citations, bibliographies and the structure of a good essay.
Many international book publishers have eased copyright restrictions during the pandemic. The procedure for permission for readalouds online so that teachers can post videos of themselves reading to their students can be found at https://www.slj.com/?detailStory=remote-learning-still-the-norm-publishers-extend-permissions-for-read-alouds-COVID-19.
If teachers read more to children online during this lockdown, they can pique students' interest in books so they will want to visit bookstores and libraries. The more students are exposed to books, the more they expand their reading horizons. If you want to talk to an interesting and articulate child with a wide range of feelings and expression, find a child who reads.
Covid19 restrictions have given us more time than ever to read, and it is a pity we still do not recognise that opportunity - especially on a government level. Why isn't the Ministry of Education insisting on
