Reading Around the World

Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime. ~Mark Twain

Today was the day to finish up my flyer for the summer reading programs I run at the Marble and Coleraine Public Libraries. Again, the theme is:

After a few hours, I finally finished. Whew! It's hard to believe that it's really almost time for the summer reading program to begin. The kids only have three weeks left of school. How is that possible?? Seems like it was only last month that I was shipping them off on those frosty October mornings.

I'm kind of excited about the theme this year. I love traveling, it's even better in real life than it was for me as a kid reading about other countries and places in books. If you can't possibly leave your area in person, you can travel through books.

I've never been to England, except through Jane Austin and others. I've never been to Ireland, but Maeve Binchy has certainly painted a lovely picture of it in her books. I've never been to China but Pearl S. Buck certainly brought me there. Afghanistan was more beautiful than I ever would have pictured through the works of Khaled Hosseini. The list goes on and on of all the places I've been through the pages of books. It has been wonderful to then travel to some of the places I've read about. New York City, San Francisco, Florida, Mexico--my list of places traveled to is a lot shorter than my list of places I've read about.

Have you visited the places you've read about? Do you dream of the places you've read about? I could not possibly visit all the places I've read about. (The Discwold is a figment of author Terry Pratchett's imagination--so there will be no traveling there.)

When you travel somewhere you've read about, or haven't read about yet; drop us a postcard. We've gotten 2 so far. A big THANK YOU to Michelle R. for the postcard from the Cayman Islands and Katie A. for the postcard from Hawaii! I would love to get some more so that our youngest patrons can see some of the places that are on this great big world of ours.