Travel

If nobody had read to me the ‘Aesop’s Fables’ and the ‘Arabian Nights’, even before I went to school, I wouldn’t have expected a world full of danger and opportunity. If later, when I was 8 or 9, I hadn’t read ‘The Little Prince’, I wouldn’t have learnt that I could be friends with a fox. And then, without ‘Gulliver’s Travels’, ‘Ivanhoe’, ‘A Christmas Carol’, ‘Through the Looking Glass’, ‘The Hobbit’ and ‘The Adventures of Tom Sawyer’, I fear that my imagination, as a contemporary city child, would have remained stagnant and poor.

And then, I wouldn’t have the urge to read the ancient Greeks, Dante, Boccaccio, Balzac, Camus, Cervantes, Dostoevsky, Flaubert, Kafka, Marquez, Proust, Melville, Orwell, even Marx and Keynes and so many more.

The books that I have read have shaped me and made me the person I am today. They taught me about freedom and democracy, friendship and love, war and peace and made me curious and studious.

Curiosity and the love of learning are basic characteristics of every human being. Nevertheless, in this day and age, the deification of consumption and easily digested TV content, has alienated many, if not most, young people from books and reading. And although most of us live in modern democracies, we still have to face cases of censorship. And exactly because we live within modern democratic societies and thankfully freedom of speech is a fact, we are exposed to all kinds of ideas and opinions.

Someone without imagination, without curiosity and without critical thinking is very easy to be manipulated and misguided when living in a society as the afore-described. Thus, one of the ways to prepare and equip tomorrow’s active citizens is to introduce them to the joy of reading and constant learning.

That is why new projects like ‘Europe’s Book Travelers’ which has recently formed and introduced itself in the city of Ioannina, Greece, can only be congratulated and welcomed with enthusiasm. The group behind that initiative is called Europe Direct of Epirus and they invite every young student of the city, free of charge, to take part in their reading groups and through this to learn how to appreciate and love reading. Their goal and hope is to expand and create Children’s Reading Clubs in every neighborhood of the city.

We wish them the best of luck and may we all live happily ever after!

Information about ‘Europe’s Book Travelers’ can be found here (in Greek)

OYED, Organization for Youth Education and Development