The author said his contemporaries struggled with the problem of how to write about the intimate, striking the difficult balance of how much to explain, imply or omit.
Links of the week March 18 2013 (12)
Our new feature links to interesting blogs or articles posted online, which will help keep you up to date with what's going on in the book world:
25 March 2013
Rachel Aydt writes: 'I've been dipping my big toe into the waters of how accessible literature is for those with print disabilities, something that recently grabbed my interest as I walked past the New York Public Library's Andrew Heiskill Braille and Talking Book Library in Manhattan's Chelsea neighborhood.'
Bookshare, a non-profit wing of the larger philanthropic agency Benetech, is a member-based organization that provides content to those with an inability or difficulty to read print (known as print disability) in the form of DAISY book digital files (Digital Accessible Information System). Of their 250,000 members, approximately 240,000 of them are students who don't pay for their memberships, largely thanks to a 5-year federal grant from OSEP (the Office of Special Education Programs). While this helps to push content into the scholastic population by offering free memberships, acquiring said content is a trickier and evolving issue.
NGO Room to Read has published 850 titles in Lao, Hindi, Tamil, Kiswahili, and 25 other languages. You've probably heard of John Wood, the former Microsoft executive who quit his job to change the world. The NGO he founded in 1999 - Room to Read - has reached out to 7.5 million children and built 15,000 libraries and 1,600 schools.
What you probably haven't heard is that Room to Read is also a huge publisher. In the almost 10 years since the NGO entered the publishing game, it has published more than 850 titles. That figure will hit 1,000 by the end of this year.
Room to Read's mission was straightforward from the outset - literacy is the cornerstone of learning and getting an education is the best way to escape from poverty. By providing children with books they are offering the chance of a better life, but they quickly realised that one of the without books in the children's mother tongue it was sometimes hard to get them enthusiastic about reading.
This itself is part of the poverty trap. "Their parents can't afford books so the publishers don't publish books in those languages and so the kids are destined to grow up illiterate which to me just seems like a humungous lost opportunity when you think about the tens of millions of kids who will never see a book in the language they speak," says Wood.
18 March 2013
World Book Day 2013: almost three quarters of parents read to their children.
Parents still find time to read to their children, despite leading increasingly busy lives and the distractions of television and the internet, according to a new survey. To mark World Book Day today, high street supermarket Sainsbury's surveyed 2,000 parents and found that 71 per cent - 10 million families - make time to read regularly to their children.