Jour­ney of a reader: from a struggle to a joy­ful sanc­tu­ary

Istill vividly remem­ber the look of hor­ror on my primary teacher’s face when she real­ised I hadn’t quite mastered the mech­an­ics of read­ing. I had been hap­pily ‘read­ing’ the story from the pic­tures, mak­ing it up as I went along, until she asked me to sound out spe­cific words. I hadn’t a clue. As a child with mild dys­lexia, it was a struggle and a ‘rude’ awaken­ing; it took me much longer to read than my peers. Yet, once I finally broke the code, you couldn’t get my nose out of a book.

Even­tu­ally, I became an Eng­lish teacher, and among my many roles in schools over the years, I have also been a teacher-lib­rar­ian. The joy of read­ing, a fas­cin­a­tion with books and a deep love for lib­rar­ies have always been part of my life. Humans are hard­wired to make sense of the world through nar­rat­ive; we con­sume stor­ies non-stop. However, there has been a sig­ni­fic­ant shift in how we con­sume them – through film, TV, pod­casts and audiobooks.

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