Welcome

This is the new blog for Time To Read. For anyone who doesn't know, Time To Read is a partnership of enthusiastic people working in public libraries in NW England, trying to develop the audience for reading. Time To Read members have lots of good ideas, loads of experience collectively and plenty of opportunities to share information with each other. We meet together every 2 months and of course the Time To Read website is an opportunity to showcase activities they are particularly pleased with.

Sometimes, however, Time To Read members want to discuss opportunities and ideas with each other before they get down to detailed planning. This blog area is intended to allow for more general discussions and general airing of opinions, without having to wait for the next meeting.

Views expressed on this blog will be the personal views of library practitioners. They won't officially reflect the opinions of employers, specifically local authority management. I personally hope that some contributions will reflect the impact that our reading activities have on readers and ourselves. There are so few opportunities for us to record some of the positive feelings and emotions which our "work" inspires. For me, there is no greater reward from organising a visit by a writer to a library than hearing audience members say how much they were inspired and motivated by the speaker. Audiences should leave wanting to read more, do more in their local area and visit libraries more often.

In the meantime, the role of reading as an Art form, is clearly moving up the radar. I found out today about what looks like a sizeable event taking place in Manchester over 4 days in early April. I read that "Reading for readings sake aims to unfold the activity of reading, the situations in which we read, reading as a shared event, a private passion, concentration, interpretation, sound and voice, the symbolic and emotional value of the act". Sounds fascinating and I will try to get along to some of it and report back here.