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BOOKS
It’s World Book Day and I am Thinking About Words
Remembering learning to read and celebrating my favourite books
March 2nd is World Book Day and a time to celebrate the very things that give us writers a purpose in life. Books.
Books, books, books. In every form, they have defined aspects of my life, given me cause to escape, helped in some way to validate my deepest feelings, and taught me more than the words themselves could ever capture.
The magic of learning to read is something that I treasure daily.
How lucky are we that we get to learn to understand these forms on paper (or screen) before us, and from there we can enter worlds we never knew existed. We can learn facts that someone else took the time to uncover. We can read stories of people whose lives are so vastly different to our own that we would never have had the chance to know of such lives without the ability to communicate through these forms that we call words.
We can experience the beauty of the words themselves and the images they conjure up. And, more than that, we can sense the greater things that lurk beneath the words.
I recently wrote about my first school — a tiny little, one-room, eight-pupil school in Tanzania — and my first…
