#its meant to say you help me NOT feel like an ill victorian child

[groovyace]

JASON POSTING AGAINNNNN FUCK YEAH!!! DC be brave and give him cool hair .. you can do it...

My haircut is hidden somewhere among these hairstyles. As are @magnusj and @twoheadedoddity 's. Feel free to throw some guesses around in the tags lmao. I would say my irls are gonna make fun of me for this.. . but considering i have just implicated them into it..

[hicsqueakfest]

Hicsqueak Fest Prompt List!

Hi all! Here’s the prompt list for Hicsqueak Fest! You can request up to 3 prompts at a time. Once you finish your fics/arts, you can come back for more! 

To claim your prompt, simply send an ask to @hicsqueakfest and copy/paste the prompt you want (you must have a tumblr username to do this). I will cross it off the list and put your name by it so it’s all yours. First come, first serve. Make sure you tell me if you’re claiming a FIC or ART prompt, because some of them are duplicates! 

Prompts are divided by FIC (sub categories: AU, AR, Gen, Smut, Lyrics/Quotes) and ART. 

HAPPY CLAIMING!

FIC

- Domestic Hicsqueak

- Hecate and Pippa are in an established relationship and see each other again after months apart. Could be smutty or domestic and cute.

- Hicsqueak first time. doesn't have to be sex (but it can be). It could be first time they do anything. Ie: ice skating together, first date, etc.

- Young Hicsqueak building staff/wand for Hecate to have more control over her magic and learning how to use it 

- Pippa and Hecate dancing

- Pippa already knows about the confinement in S1, how she deals with all the little ways Hecate makes excuses to not do things; and how she eventually reacts to Hecate telling her about the confinement.

- Pregnancy fic - Hecate pregnant. Pippa being the best. Mildred minding her own business.

- Single parent Pippa meets her child’s teacher Hecate @ohlookitstomorrowff

- Hicsqueak flying together on a broom

- Domestic Hicsqueak (I need a lot of that)

- A series of firsts with Pippa, after Hecate is set free

- Hecate is clueless about how attractive she is, and Pippa tries her best not to be jealous (but she so is)

- Hicsqueak as parents (interpret "parents" however you want)

- Going hunting

- Going fishing

- Visiting a planetarium together

- Hurt/Comfort. Mistress Broomhead remarks in front of Pippa that Hecate "continues to have poor taste in companions." Pippa asks Hecate what Broomhead meant by it, and Hecate has to make a choice whether or not to reveal the whole Indigo incident.

- Miss Bat catches Hecate and Pippa out of bed past curfew, but instead of punishing them, she just mercilessly teases them about it for the rest of term.

- Gardening together

- Comparing stories of the weirdest stuff they confiscated from students

- Playing poker

- “Have you done this before?" @hovercraft79

- Forehead kisses

- Adventuring to find rare ingredients for Hecate's experiments that the school can't afford @cliotheproclaimer

- Visiting Pentangle's Academy for the first time

- Candlelight supper

- Hecate introducing Star to Pippa

- Playing Mario Kart

- Pippa shows Hecate all the video games she's confiscated from her students, one of which is Skyrim. (I bet Hecate would be a closet GTA5 player after)

- Ethel saw their first kiss and is about to cause havoc

- Playing billiards

- They have a fight at Cackle's and Pippa leaves but Hecate chases her and slams into the barrier and falls off her broom and that's how Pippa finds out about the confinement @allthosegaywitches    

- What if Hecate encounters [a siren] and it takes the form of the person she desires most and Pippa is there to save her or vice versa

- There was a post not too long ago where it was discussed that its possible many girls had crushes on Hecate. So my prompt is: Pippa keeps them unknowingly all away from her Hiccup and years later at a reunion Hecate realized how many girls liked her while Pippa realizes how she really feels about Hecate.

- "I was afraid of what you'd think of me." @maybegarbo

- A fic about/involving musical harmony as a chant method - how did Pippa come to decide this was a better way of doing it, for example? (either gen or shippy)

- Hicsqueak picnic

- Pregnancy fic because there’s not enough of those... Bonus if Hecate is the pregnant one

- Fake dating

- Hicsqueak discovering their favorite ways to snuggle

- Pentangle's academy is under attack Pippa is struggling against the enemy but Hecate comes to protect and save her wife (and the academy)

- Pippa is injured/sick and Hecate takes care of her @cliotheproclaimer

- Hicsqueak wedding

- End of year, the graduating girls play pranks on the teachers and this year someone magicked a mariachi band to follow Hecate around ALL DAY and every time she vanishes them they just reappear with one more band mate

- Staff party at the end of the year Pippa is invited too; Hecate doesn't like those parties and so never shows up but since this year Pippa is going she might go as well too

- Mildred yelling, "Ethel, if you don't stop being a homophobe, DuRIng PRide mONth, then I will yeet you out the window!!!" @firesofthestars

- Fist fight

- Hecate visits Pentangle's

- Going to festivals together

- The first time Hecate sleeps outside of Cackle's, in Pippa's bed. She knows this is where she belongs.

- Hecate gets sick, Pippa takes care of her

- Accidental magic. Something silly preferable to angsty, but if angst calls to you then by all means. For example: the reason Hecate is nicknamed Hiccup is because accidental magic gave her a case of uncontrollable hiccups. that sort of thing.

- Going to conferences together

- Hicsqueak. Pippa asks Hecate why she didn't lift the confinement spell when she (Hecate) was the acting headmistress (mid season 2)

- Hicsqueak in the aftermath of s3, emphasis on Hecate dealing with her trauma and figuring out how to have a healthy relationship

- Hecate as Pippa's "knight in shining armour" (can be non-magical or magical and from gen to smutty, whatever you make of it). Basically the classic damsel-in-distress-scenario with a badass Hecate coming to the rescue. If swordfighting could be included, that would be awesome!  @well-met-and-good-day-to-you-sir

- AND THERE WAS ONLY ONE BED

- Broomstick racing

- Fake Married trope! 

- Smoking weed together

- Touring witch colleges together/touring the country together

- Camping in the forest (the one surrounding Cackle's or any other)

- Getting drunk together for the first time

- Cuddles

- Pippa-centric, missing Hecate through the years @emiline-northeto

- Hecate-centric, missing Pippa through the years

- After Hecate and Pippa reconcile, their familiars aren’t quite sure how they feel about it.

- Hicsqueak conference fic

- Hicsqueak day at the beach

- Young!Hicsqueak - Hecate lied to Pippa about what happened to Indigo 

- "I don't think I ever stopped waiting for you."

- Pippa has always known about Hecate’s confinement and the hurt over the broomstick display came from her belief that Hecate didn’t have enough faith in them.

- Pippa finds out about Hecate’s confinement - and not from her.

- Fic where Hecate reconnects with her parents after the confinement is over - with Pippa’s support, of course.

- Hecate's favourite colour is pink 

- "You're an idiot" 

- Wedding fic 

- Baby fic 

- After the s3 finale, Hecate discovers the world with Pippa by her side 

- 5 trips Hecate and Pippa take together 

- 5 things Hecate wore that weren't her standard black dress @maybegarbo

- 5 times Pippa tapped Hecate's nose after Spelling Bee (bonus, but not obligatory: and one time Hecate tapped Pippa's) @shafeferi 

- 5 times Hecate and Pippa almost kissed (and one time they did) 

- Pippa gets abducted and Hecate loses it and tries to find her 

- Heat-of-the-moment kissing 

- Either of them gets implicated in a crime and there's ample evidence against them, so they go on the run, but the other is fiercely on their side and helps them any way they can / goes on the run with them 

- Coming out 

- Ace!Hecate @amillionmillionvoices

- Pippa is on the brink of getting married, and Hecate is heartbroken but doesn't think it's her place to say anything 

- One year, seven months, three weeks and two days  @ephemeral-winter

- 5 sunsets they saw together 

- "Ask me to marry you again" 

- Emotional scars 

- Morning routine 

- One day in the life 

- Hecate is bored in a meeting and decides to text Pippa on her maglet, Pippa texts back immediately 

- Pippa is ill, Hecate takes care of her and/or vice versa 

AU

- Doctor Who AU

- Persuasion (Jane Austen Novel) AU

- AU where they're Sirens and they have to deal with Odysseus. Or even about when Demeter gave the Sirens wings to search for Persephone

- MERMAIDS!

- Pirates

- AU in the Harlots universe @concreteangel1221

- Space commanders (Star Trek/Star Wars)

- Crime syndicate

- Street racers

- An AU where they go to Woodstock '69

- Middle earth

- Hecate lives above a bar, and is always angry about the noise. Pippa, the proprietor, has something to say about that. 

- Westeros

- Titanic AU, except there was enough room on the door! 

- Notting Hill AU

- Skyrim

- Witch in the Woods AU: Hecate does Pippa a favor, in exchange for her first-born child. But when Pippa shows up, distraught, 15 years later with a baby, Hecate wants no part of it.  @merricatsgarden

- Georgian Era

- Bus drivers (bus driver... what bus driver?)

- Stealing a car together (au)

- Dragon trainer. Pippa is gifted a dragon and needs someone to help her train and handle it. Enter Hecate Hardbroom, the Dragon Whisperer.

- Detective AU (potentially a bit humorous, a la Tommy & Tuppence or Psych, for example)

- Hecate is a college professor and Pippa is an older student returning to get her degree and the two fall in love

- Fluffy Harry Potter au where Hecate frequents nocturne ally for potions ingredients.

- Hicsqueak Victorian au

- Flirting / UST

- Heatwave

- Business woman/bakery or tea show owner AU

- Library AU @hovercraft79

- Medical AU

- Teacher/parent au @thegeneralisalive 

- Potions shop / magical pharmacy / similar au

- Soulmate au

- Spies / secret agents au

- Space au

- Princesses AU

AR (Alternate Reality) 

- AU: the thirty years of separation didn't happen, what are their life like now? (Living together, happily married, children?) @captaintangledmess

- Hecate's ~25 years old, she is given one day out of Cackles, what does she do? (Run to Pippa + drama ensues? Go somewhere else? Try to get Pippas help and they live happily ever after?)

- A canon-divergance AU where Pippa does end up with Ada's job in s2 and they have to work as a team. Lots of angst material there

- Pre-Spelling Bee and ignoring the whole stupid s3 confinement plot. Hecate and Pippa run into each other over the years at events, conferences, etc. @pellucidthings

- Hecate gives up her magic to restore the founding stone at the end of s2 @amillionmillionvoices

- AU where Hecate DOES show up to the broomstick waterskiing display, but someone sabotages her broom, and she crashes. Lots of #feelings and Hicsqueak hurt/comfort

- Tattooed!Hecate AU where Pippa has no idea that almost every inch of her is inked until she undresses her for the first time... @maybemoira / MauraMae

- AU where Hecate’s ‘confinement’ is because she’s a werewolf. @maybemoira

Gen

- Gen-Hecate, she discovers she has a sister 

- Hecate tutoring Mildred without being prompted or ordered to do so.

- Hecate supporting Maud during a difficult time @marvelousmadmadammim

- How Pippa came to found her school 

- Dimity being a friend to Hecate after the events of s3

- Dimity and Pippa becoming friends at a staff party or conference 

- A student comes out to Hecate, and she has to figure out how to handle it/how much to reveal about her own life

- 5 people Pippa came out to over the years (bonus + 1 she didn’t) @shafeferi 

Lyrics/Quotes

- Bastille's song JOY. Either take a line or just the song in general

- ‘But I'm on my way back home / It's been hard to be away’ (Dying Day- Brandi Carlile.)

- Interpret the poem "One-Act Play In Which Not All Problems Can Be Solved, & Not All Problems Are Problems, But Even So, Some Are" by Dalton Day, for Hicsqueak in light of S3, especially the bit that goes "ME: I have hands. You said you are scared of things like hands. Are you scared of my hands? YOU: Yes. ME: You have hands, too. Are you scared of your hands? YOU: Yes. ME: What if we traded hands?"

- Take the poem "One-Act Play In Which We Float Facedown In the Center Of A Lake, A Position Known As The Dead Man's Float" by Dalton Day as your starting point. Make me cry.

- Baby take me outside / kiss me in the moonlight / i just want you to touch me / i don't wanna waste no time (léon - surround me)

- I am no good at goodbyes / i never was and i don't know why / tell me, tell me that it was love / that it was real, remember all / that you have me if you still want me / baby, i'm no good at goodbyes / i never was and i don't know why (léon - no goodbyes)

- Want You Back by HAIM

- Supercut by Lorde

- ‘Will you lie here for me?’ (Lizzie)

- ‘She’s seen the pain that comes with your displeasure’ (Lizzie)

- ‘Maybe some day I’ll walk in the open’ (Lizzie)

- ‘They tried to keep me down, but I said no’ (Lizzie)

- ‘Let me tell you losing is not a game I play’ (Lizzie)

- ‘I sit here in the darkness, waiting for the light’ (Lizzie)

- ‘I know I got ‘em beat’ (Lizzie)

- ‘Watch me fly away’ (Lizzie)

- ‘Maybe some day I’ll walk in the open’ (Lizzie)

- ‘Maybe some day we’ll tell the world’ (Lizzie)

- ‘Into your wildest dreams I’ll fly’ (Lizzie)

- ‘You’ll see my face in every night sky’ (Lizzie)

- ‘Lock away your secrets, lock away my life’ (Lizzie)

- ‘I was a trembling child’ (Lizzie)

- ‘But now I see my troubled soul reflected’ (Lizzie)

- ‘What I don’t see can never hurt me’ (Lizzie)

- ‘But I’m more afraid to stay’ (Lizzie)

- ‘Settle cozy dark as sleep’ (Lizzie)

- ‘I want to sleep with my eyes half open’ (Lizzie)

- ‘You didn’t choose what side you’re on’ (Lizzie)

- ‘I’m standing looking forward in the dark’ (Lizzie)

- ‘It’s just us girls’ (Lizzie)

- ‘Don’t let them see how the fire burns’ (Lizzie)

- ‘Who told you that?!’ (Lizzie)

- ‘Will you bite through the skin to the sweet truth within?’ (Lizzie)

- ‘Will you stay?’ (Lizzie)

- ‘In every room a prisoner of a long silent war’ (Lizzie)

- ‘Sometimes you say the words, but this is not love’ (Lizzie)

- ‘I know if I stay here longer it’s gonna turn out bad’ (Lizzie)

- ‘Would you let me comfort you, if you knew?’ (Lizzie)

- ‘I can barely breath tonight’ (Lizzie)

- ‘A secrets just a lie’ (Lizzie)

- ‘Every night I dream of you’ (Lizzie)

- ‘The violence of freedom’ (Lizzie)

- ‘My silver wings are pinioned with green gold’ (Lizzie)

- ‘I feel myself disintegrating’ (Lizzie)

- ‘Oh that I had wings like a dove’ (Lizzie)

Smut/NC17

- Pippa persuading and watching Hecate touch herself

- Hecate’s first visit to an “adult” toy store with Pippa as an equally wide-eyed guide.

- Pippa telling Hecate all the dirty things she wants to do to her

- Hicsqueak smut, not first time, they're both happy and confident in their sexuality and relationship

- Dom!Hecate has Pippa in "detention" 

- Cuddle sex

- Angry sex

- Kisses/hugging/sexy times

- Pippa buying lingerie for Hecate and telling her how much she'd love for her to wear it // she does

- Hecate’s first time

- Hecate stripping for Pippa, feat. a nervous Hecate and a reassuring Pippa who has Hecate on her lap as soon as she can.

- Pippa calling Hecate "Good girl", Hecate calling Pippa "Miss Pentangle" during sex.

- 5 times hecate went down on Pippa

- "I hate this dress." / "then take it off me."

- Dom!Pippa telling Hecate when she can/can't cum - up to you if Hecate does or doesn't do as shes told.

ART

- Kisses! Sweet, passionate, you name it, any kiss. but Hicsqueak art of kisses would be really nice.

- Doctor Who AU

- MERMAIDS!

- Pirates @kayryn

- Space commanders (Star Trek/Star Wars)

- Crime syndicate

- Hecate stripping for Pippa, feat. a nervous Hecate and a reassuring Pippa who has Hecate on her lap as soon as she can.

- Street racers

- Middle earth

- Westeros @kayryn

- Pippa and Hecate dancing.

- Skyrim

- Georgian Era @kayryn

- Bus drivers (bus driver... what bus driver?)

- Cooking a full English breakfast together

- Afternoon tea @merricatsgarden

- Hecate's first trip to the beach, with Pippa

- Sunbathing

- "I don't think I ever stopped waiting for you."

- Swimming

- Swimming in a moonlit pond/pool. @merricatsgarden

- Stargazing

-  Adult Hecate standing between Pippa and some idiot man/Headbroom trying to hurt her

- Want You Back by HAIM

- Supercut by Lorde

- Forehead kisses

- Hicsqueak kissing under the mistletoe (I know it's not really that time of the year sorry)

- Hicsqueak wedding

- Hicsqueak flying together on a broom

[welshwoman1988]

A Thread In The Tapestry: What Was Once Shadows And Ash...

(Quick note: I was blown away by the love that this has received and am so very happy people want to see more! I must once again thank @thisdiscontentedwinter for coming up with the idea and letting me run away with it! *HUGS!!*

Please note that this is unbetaed and merely me trying to get it out before it gets swept away by something else. I will have it betaed before I place it up on AO3 at a later date!)

Part One is here, for those that missed it!

The night gets even weirder when John is escorted to the Hale House and is thrown by the sight of a beautiful Victorian mansion instead of the burnt husk that he had met Derek and Deaton at earlier that day.

(And why is it that Derek’s ruined home the meet-up spot whenever the lot of them need to get together? John really needs to talk to the city council about either rebuilding the house as a town-wide apology for thinking Derek was a murderer, or tearing it down to make some sort of memorial to the Hale family instead…

Not that he can right now, considering that the building is standing firm and hearty-although missing a few things, like the deck that wraps around the house, for some reason…-and who’s going to believe him if he says that this whole area will be nothing but blackened ruins in a decade or more’s time?)

“You’ve been awfully quiet, dear, are you sure you’re alright?”

John wants to laugh at the gentle way that Julia is treating him, at the way Peter seems torn between wanting to act as if he’s above all of this and like John is the most interesting thing he’s ever seen. John can only imagine what he smells like to the pair of them…

Granted, they’ve been really subtle about scenting him and if John hadn’t been spending the past couple of months trying to softly prod Derek into taking a position at the police station, he’d probably miss it altogether.

As it is, John knows exactly what that certain tilt of the head that Julia is making means and he tries to pull himself together, despite not really knowing how he’s supposed to feel; he’s the poster child for ‘a far way from home’ and he’s been seeing things alive and healthy that are nothing but ash and ruin in his time…

“Dear?”

“I’m fine.” John tries a smile, but it just makes Julia’s frown deepen and Peter finally move from his ‘unaffected’ slouch against a tree to stand beside his mother, clearly on the defensive now. It makes John curse before he tries again, “I’m sorry, I just… don’t really know what I’m doing here and… I don’t know what I should say.”

That eases the frowning a bit, but Julia still seems somewhat ill at ease as she nods toward the house, stating, “Well, there’s a landline in the living room; you can call someone to come pick you up and hope everything clears up in the morn-”

A duet of cries interrupts her as a pair of toddlers burst out of the front door, running straight for their mother and slamming so hard into her legs that they nearly bowl her over.

“Mommy, Mommy, Mommy! Luke took my doll, Mommy! Make him give it back!”

“I did not! She’s lying! I wasn’t anywhere near her dumb doll!”

“Were too! I could smell-”

“Children!” Julia cuts off the fighting with a low growl that John can barely hear, but still stops the argument in its tracks as both kids immediately drop their gazes to the forest floor. “Ignoring that I distinctly remember putting both of you to bed hours ago, we don’t fight in front of guests, now do we?”

“No, Mom.” The pair chorus, eyes darting over to John before snapping back to looking at the ground. There’s a moment of silence before the girl whispers, or at least, does so in that voice that little kids think is whispering, “He smells kinda funny, Mommy. Is he like Uncle Deaton?”

John immediately leans over when he sees the way that both Julia and Peter tense, adding his own ‘whisper’ to the conversation. “You didn’t tell me I smelled! Oh no, did I step in something on the way here? Does Uncle Deaton step in things a lot too? He really should watch where he’s going…”

Julia stance loosens as her children giggle at John’s exaggerated tone, but Peter simply narrows his eyes and frowns at him, making John mentally curse as he tries to find some way to salvage the situation.

The last thing that he needs is for someone to think he’s some kind of hunter or anything like that…

“Hey, you two! I told you that you could wait up for Mom if you stayed inside the house! Get back here!”

Swallowing hard, John turns toward the voice and has to brace himself at the sight of a young Talia Hale, Derek’s eyes staring back at him from her face as her gaze darts from her mother, her siblings, and John like she isn’t sure who she should focus on.

“Well, that explains what they’re still doing up.” Julia sighs, the twins giggling and clinging to their mother as Talia hops down past the stairs leading up to the house, making her way toward them with a playful growl.

“Talia…” John’s voice comes out as a shocked gasp, but still everyone freezes as if he had just pulled a gun on the poor girl.

It’s another kick to the heart when she pulls Derek’s usual defensive move after a few moments of silence; arms crossed in front of the chest, head tilted in challenge before demanding, “Do I know you?”

Unable to hold it back anymore, John finally gives into the hysterical laughter that had been bubbling at the back of his mind ever since he first saw Julia Hale, dead for nearly two decades, walk through a clearing as if she had just stepped away for those years and had decided it was time to come back home…

When John finally comes back to himself, the twins are gone and he’s surrounded by tense werewolves, fingers twitching as if they were just barely keeping themselves from sprouting claws.

It goes without saying that it might be a good idea for him to keep from making any sudden movements for the time being.

Looking up, John meets Talia’s gaze, unable to keep from cataloging all the similarities he can see between her and Derek; same eyes, same facial structure, same way of frowning with mostly her eyebrows…

Laughing once more at the direction his thoughts have gone, no doubt influenced by his recent talks with Stiles, John is suddenly sobered by the realization that this is a time where Derek’s mother is alive, that his family is still living! He might just have a chance at stopping a tragedy from happening… something that he can’t do if the Hales think he’s some sort of nutjob or an Eichen House escapee.

“No, I didn’t know you all that well, you were a pretty private person.” John can see that he’s only confusing them further, so he keeps as still as possible as he continues, “I do know your son, though. Arrested him for a crime he didn’t commit once, so sorry about that.”

“I don’t have a son.” Talia sounds more intrigued than defensive, so John counts that as a win even as Peter growls as he finally pushes himself to his feet.

“That’s right, you don’t have one… yet, but you will, and he turns out to be a pretty decent Alpha once he learns to ask for help.”

That’s as far as John gets before there’s a sudden snarling and he’s slammed against a tree with a hand tightening around his throat, a furrowed brow and more teeth then there should be in a human’s mouth in his face, and oh God, he’s going to die in the past without a way to let Stiles know-

Oh, God! Stiles isn’t even going to be born-!

“PETER! Let him go!” The demand has that extra snarl in it that means someone is using their ‘wolf voice’ to give the command, but all John can focus on is the fingers loosening their grip, the teeth moving away from his face, and he breathes in deep to thank Julia…

…only to see her staring unblinkingly at Talia, whose own eyes were slowly fading back into their kaleidoscope hue, looking at John with an expression of bewildered fear.

John is also fighting off his own confusion; weren’t Alphas the only ones that had red eyes…?

“Peter,” Julia’s voice cuts through his musings and she moves forward to place a hand on her daughter’s shoulder, seeming to break her out of her own head as well. “Go call Deaton and let him know that we need to make an emergency appointment. I don’t care how you do it, but we need to see him tonight.”

Peter makes a grunt of begrudging acknowledgement, like only a teenager can, and lopes towards the house as if he didn’t just have his claws digging into John’s shoulders not a minute ago… John, however, is too busy watching the other two to pay enough attention to feel offended.

Talia had slightly tipped her head when her brother left, something that John has seen the kids do around Derek once or twice-usually after a big argument-so he’s not that surprised when Julia’s hand shifts up further on her throat as she mutters something too low for John to hear.

He knows what Talia is doing anyway:

Submitting. Reestablishing her position in the Pack. Acknowledging her mother as her Alpha.

John fights off a shiver at the thought that he might already be changing things, and not all for the better; because the fact that there even needed to be a reestablishment in the first place meant that it hadn’t been Julia that had told Peter to back off…

It had been Talia.

[contre-qui]

Book 6 of 2020: Eleanor

Covid19 Quarantine Book 3

Eleanor by Mary Augusta Humphrey Ward

“'And we say that the world lives by Science! Fools! when has it lived by anything else than Dreams - at Athens, at Rome, or Jerusalem?’“ (201)

    This was a little bit of a doozy, if I'm being honest. Eleanor has been out of print for years and I sort of understand why. Don't get me wrong; I appreciate the novel for what it is and what it says, but I don't know that I'll ever count it among my favorites. An argument could be made that Eleanor is the main character in this novel - or was intended to be - but I personally felt the young American Lucy was the protagonist. The novel opens on the small family grouping of Eleanor Burgoyne, her cousin Edward Manisty, and his aunt. The three of them are staying in a beautiful villa in Rome while Edward works on his book and Eleanor assists him and attempts to recover her somewhat failing health, which has plagued her since the death of her husband and young child years ago. The family is expecting Lucy's arrival, a young American protestant traveling and visiting. I'm a little unsure as to what Lucy's familial relationship with these three is, but I think she might be distantly related - or perhaps the family member of a friend of the Manisty's. Either way, Lucy is young and innocent, and Eleanor immediately takes a liking to her, while Edward immediately avoids her. However, Eleanor sees her almost as a doll to play with, and thinks perhaps Lucy and Edward might be a good romantic match. Drama, of course, ensues, as Eleanor then grapples with jealousy over Edward's blossoming affection for Lucy. While all of this is happening, Edward is in the throes of writing a book about the somewhat recent unification of Italy and the dominance of Roman Catholicism. The Manisty's and Eleanor are English Anglicans, meaning they belong to the Church of England as it was in the Victorian era. Lucy, on multiple occasions, confronts Edward about his views on the developing Italy; Edward feels that Italy should be preserved in its current state, rather than being developed so the commoners can farm the land like they need to, just because Edward thinks he deserves to see the land preserved for his tourism. Lucy, the Protestant, however, challenges these ideas and demonstrates to Edward that change is not a bad thing. The novel progresses in this way until Edward's affection for Lucy becomes undeniable and Eleanor's health fails miserably. At this time, Eleanor and Lucy flee to the countryside to escape Edward and there develop a close friendship, somewhat akin to an older and younger sister or a mother and daughter.

     The novel is meant to be a commentary on development and the handoff between the old and new, as well as how the public feels about it. The novel is set in contrast to the Legend of Nemi, which is told in its entirety in the book when it becomes relevant, so I won't go into it here. Again, I appreciate this book from a literary standpoint, but I just didn't enjoy it for its entertainment value. This was a book I was reading for class, so I've done a lot more analysis on it than my typical reviews (but maybe this isn't the best place to launch into all of that). I found Eleanor rather slow at the beginning, and I didn't really understand the point of it until after I had discussed it with the rest of my class. I still think it's a dry novel, and the only interesting bits are right at the very end; also, the ending is extremely abrupt and there is little closure on one of the characters.

    One thing I will say that I think helps stomach the novel a little: Edward is not important. Edward is meant to represent the public as a whole, and he is not meant to be an individual character. So if you hate him, that's fine. Pretty much my whole class did. I didn't completely despise him, but he did bug me for a lot of the book. He himself is not really important, though. The important thing here is the relationship between Eleanor and Lucy, and how it changes throughout the book.

    Trigger warnings for illness/character death (including a vague description of accidental suicide [someone jumps off a balcony while under the influence of extreme fever]), mental illness, and descriptions of religion.

    My final opinion: Unless you're really into the Italian unification and religion/development in the Victorian era, maybe pass on this one.

[never-enough-darksiders]

Can I plez get a scenario for Death, whose s/o has worked themself to exhaustion?

Traveling for days on end. The world was barren, dark, cold. The white of your eyes always seeming bright against the gray landscape and destroyed Victorian buildings. The dryness of your mouth and heavy eyes told you dehydration and sleep deprivation was settling in.

You’d chosen to stick alongside the male, the resurrection of mankind doing you little favor with the mobs wanting you gone for associating yourself with the horsemen. You’d refused staying behind, knowing your rider was off acting as.. well, Death.

Both of you were well aware your body wasn’t as durable as his. Humans are fragile, need breaks and to replenish energy frequently. The back of your head nagged to you, telling you over and over that Death would be done with the mission by now, had you not tagged along. So what did you do to make it stop?

You stopped stopping.

Pushing through the hunger and need of water, taking only power naps rather than getting a decent amount of sleep. You’d take out all of your physical and mental frustration on any demons you’d come across, shocking even Death with the new intensity of your side of the battles. He’d even question if you were nearly as fluid as him when in one of your spells, though he’d dare not to say it aloud.

He had to know, you told yourself. He had to be aware something is off at this point. You’d been forcing yourself like this for a week now, stomaching only small snacks you’d find rather than sitting to eat a meal. Sipping from a pond, any pond, not caring if it was clean or not. You just didn’t want to be dead weight.

Your limbs were always heavy, feeling like they were ten times their weight after a nap. Not moving for any amount of time, whether it be a second or to stop and chat with somebody, your body ached to just rest. You really wished the rubble and landscape itself was in good enough condition to summon Despair.

Thoughts were racing in your head about this topic for what seemed like hours, you were walking on autopilot. Focusing on your thoughts meant you’d have entirely missed Death calling your name, only being pulled back into reality by a harsh hand on your shoulder. He yanked you to face him, it took you a moment before your brain could wrap around what happened.

It took several seconds before your eyes found his, struggling to focus on him. When you did, his fiery eyes were clearly giving you a harsh glare. “What is wrong, y/n? I have been calling for you for the last two miles, have I wronged you and it result in you ignoring me?”

The amount of talking he did gave you a bit of a shock, since he’d usually give you short and straight to the point comments. “Hm? No, I’m just thinking about stuff is all. Sorry, my head’s a bit unscrewed right now.”

His eyes widened enough for you to notice, his hand shifting from your shoulder to your forehead. “Are you ill?”

A chuckle you couldn’t help escaped your lips as you pushed his hand away. “I’m okay. Even if I was burning up, it’d be because we’ve been walking so much for so long.”

“Then let us rest for now, there seems to be an intact building nearby.” You watched the horseman take a few steps ahead of you in a different direction.

“No! We can keep going, it’s okay.” Your arms reached out and you hugged his arm, leaning half your weight on him. The sudden movement making the rider lose a bit of his composure.

“You have not properly rested for quite a while, y/n. Come.” he kept walking, watching you as you clung to his arm. Groaning in protest, your steps were that of a drunk person. Not well coordinated, lazy movements that were delayed until you were losing your balance which resulted in stomping every step.

This threw off the rider for sure, his eyes glued to you until you both reached the building. You stood against a wall, watching as he set up a place for you to comfortably sleep. Once it was done, he gestured his arms at it for you.

“No.”

Death’s arms fell to his sides slowly, his eyes widened at the response. “No? You are tired, y/n.”

“You don’t get to tell me if I’m tired or not, we’d be done with this by now if you didn’t keep hounding me to stop lately.” your arms crossed over your chest, and you strained your jaw to hold back a yawn.

“If you are going to claim to not be tired, then I will tell you when you are tired.” He took slow strides in your direction, pointing a finger at himself. “Do you believe I do not notice”- his finger turned to you -”how you stumble when walking, your dry coughs, hear your stomach growl several times a day. I see many signs of you not getting enough sleep, and your body will self destruct if you continue to do this to yourself, y/n.”

The rider got in your face, leaning down to be at your level. His finger prodded at your chest, right between your collarbones. “You are killing yourself with every day you behave like this. I will not allow you to continue to beat your body into nothing, y/n.”

You scoffed, stepping away and moving to a corner in the room, ignoring the dead feeling in your legs as you shifted. “I’m not beating myself up. I’m just trying to keep up more is all. Of course I’m going to be a little different when my body isn’t used to this stuff like yours is, it’s ok-”

Your voice was cut off by the horseman gripping your shoulders and pressing you into the corner you now stood in. “You do not need to keep up. You do not need to push yourself for the sake of making this mission faster. Had this needed to be done quickly, I would not have brought you. You do well enough on your own, you fight well and make cunning choices. I do not have to worry for you as much as you believe so. That is, until you’ve gone and done this to yourself.”

Your eyelids were getting heavier, and you fought yourself to stay upright. “Why’d ya’ let me tag along then? ‘m just makin’ this last longer than it should.”

“I relish in your company, y/n. Only if its not to harm you. If I had half a mind I would turn around and send you home as soon as I saw the problem, but I seem to go mad when you are involved. It appears I have given you more credit than due, thinking you would stop the childish actions before it became serious. I am displeased to see I was wrong.” You shot down by an inch, as your legs buckled under you. your arms flew out to grab his arms as he switched to holding you around your waist in an instant. “Now will you rest, stubborn child?”

Your response was a hushed hum as you gently pushed yourself in his direction. The rider guided you over to the spot he’d previously prepared, helping you lay down. He removed your shoes, followed by tossing a blanket over your form. He was sitting quietly at your side, staring at a hole in a nearby wall deep in his thoughts when your slurred words startled him. “Didja’ just say to me that I make you crazy?”

“Hush little one.” Death reached down to move a lock of your hair behind your ear. “Get some rest before I truly go mad.”

[agl03]

Finding My Way Back To You

For the @aosrewatch Reunion prompt.  I was going for fluff…not sure I succeeded…but enjoy.  

Leopold Fitz Radcliffe had always felt like something was missing from his life.   Ever since he could remember there had been a hole, an ache in his chest he just couldn’t shake.   Though every so often he would get a flash, most triggered by every day things.  

The scent of Lavender and someone curled into his chest.

The sound of a kettle boiling and a warmth that could only be described as home filled him.

The sight of the stars shimmering at night telling him something Magnificent was out there.  

He had once told his adoptive parents of this, Holden and Agnes Radcliffe. They pair had smiled adoringly at each other and assured him that one day he would find a love and child as they had to fill the void.   They even tried to help him with a nearly constant stream of carefully vetted pretty faces.   Each and every one unable to hold a candle to the unknown Fitz was waiting for.  

Today he was expected to meet yet another one of those Radcliffe approved choices at a party they were putting on to celebrate their most recent breakthrough in prosthetics.  A English Garden Party of all things.  Agnes loving time honored tradition in counter to the future that their tech represented.  

Fitz hadn’t wanted to come at all as he preferred to stay out of the public eye as much as possible. Not liking the spot light or attention. Radcliffe had fostered and encouraged this when he was younger and kept him sheltered since taking him in when he was ten.  Worried that Fitz would be the target of rival corporations, Shield, and the occasional ransom junkie out to make a quick buck.  However, the older and more successful Fitz became the more he felt like a show pony being trotted out for a photo op.  

“Ten minutes Sir,” The voice called from the other side of the door and Fitz heaved a heavy sigh.  Perhaps he could slip away after cocktails.  The event was mercifully at an old Victorian Cottage Radcliffe had purchased years ago and meant that Fitz had his own space to slip away too once it got too much.   Until then he put the simple grey suit and Lavender tie Agnes had sent for him.

888888888

The party was just as bad as all the others.   Fitz stood dutifully at Radciffe’s side, shook hands or answered the occasional question.   Finally getting a moment to himself when Radcliffe was pulled away to speak with Melinda May.   He used the opportunity to slip away to an unused portion of the deck and sit on the weathered swing.   He had always loved this swing, spending countless hours on it growing up simply reading books or sketching designs that had long since come to life.

“Its not Perthshire but it is quite lovely,” a voice said and caused Fitz to jump.    

He turned to see a beautiful brunette tentatively approach with tears in her eyes.  Something about seeing tears in those eyes made him want to go to her immediately and take her into his arms to kiss them away.   She had dressed like the other guests, a long white tea length dress with blue flowers bursting across the fabric.  A matching jeweled comb in her hair.  Forget me Nots he noted.  Odd as most of the ladies dresses he’d seen had more traditional flowers such as roses and peonies on them.  

“I beg your pardon?” he asked when he found his voice.

She offered a sad smile and one of the tears leaked free to streak down her cheek.   “You are like the others you don’t remember,” she said as she carefully approached.  

“Remember what?” Fitz asked, amazed she had gotten this close. Normally someone from his protection detail would show up by now and take out anyone who got this close.  

As if he had heard his thoughts Radcliffe’s slightly panicked voice could be heard from the lawn.  “Fitz! Where are you?”

The girl cursed and rushed forward and grabbed Fitz’s hands, her thumb tracing circles over his knuckle in a surprisingly comforting gesture.   “Fitz, I need you to listen to me,” she said quickly.

Fitz knew he should pull away or call for help.   But he somehow knew she would never hurt him.  Her name on the tip of his tongue.  “You’ve been kidnapped by Radcliffe and AIDA.  You are in the Framework and your memories were wiped. This, none of this is real!  I need you to remember so we can find where they are holding you and the oth—“

“Get away from him!  Get away from my son!” Radcliffe yelled as he rounded the corner. “Security!”

Fitz looked between Radcliffe and the girl and tried to shake the feeling he was in the middle of a tug of war.   Only to let out a cry of surprise when she grabbed him by his perfectly pressed suit jacket and pulled his lips to hers.   Her tears wet his cheeks while her hands were so cold they gave him goose bumps despite the warm summer afternoon.  “You dove through a hole in the Universe for me Fitz and I will tear apart this world if that is what it takes to get you back.”  

Before Fitz could respond she had moved and shoved him right into a charging Grant Ward who had come to Radcliffe’s aid.   The action of catching Fitz forced him to lower his weapon just long enough for Jemma to leap over the railing and disappear into the crowd.  

Ward handed Fitz off to his father before taking off in what would be a fruitless pursuit.  

Radcliffe eased Fitz to the ground while he kept a protective hand on his arm.   Even as more security personal ran by and others positioned themselves in  protective ring around the pair.  “Are you okay?” Radcliffe asked as his hands took Fitz’s face to properly look him over. “She didn’t hurt you or inject you with anything?”

Fitz shook his head too stunned to speak while his lips still tingled from her touch.  As if it had been one of hundreds before.   Satisfied there were no physical injuries Radcliffe helped him up and ushered Fitz into the house.  “Go to your suite and lock the door.  I’m going to help clear our our guests and will be up with some tea….and perhaps a shot of whiskey as soon as I can.  Alright?”

Fitz merely nodded and quickly ran into his room bolting the door before he sank onto his bed.   He kept getting flashes of what he thought had been dreams, but now seemed like more.   That same girl at his side countless times.   With a shaky hand he shrugged off his jacket and heard a soft thud on the wood floor.  

The item sparkled in the sun that streamed through his windows.  Fitz picked it up and recognized it in and instant. It was the jeweled comb of Forget Me Nots the girl had worn in her hair, she must have slipped it into his pocked during their embrace.   He turned the delicate piece over and found something etched into the silver, for some reason the simple phrase took his breath away.

Come back to me, Love Jemma.

8888888

Fitz spent the next week in a haze.   The flashes of memories continued to grow stronger and more frequent.   While Radcliffe became more determined than ever to make sure it never happened again.   He’d moved Fitz that night to the Penthouse in the heart of the city, arguably the most secure property in his portfolio.  And rather that Fitz go into their lab, they stayed and worked in the lab there.   Any an all outings under the heavy guard.

Fitz felt it was a drastic over reaction.  The girl had intended him no harm but Radcliffe had become obsessed with the idea she was there to take Fitz from him.  

By the time Friday had come around Fitz was about to go out of his mind from being cooped up all week.  And he did something he had never done before, he snuck out.  He had faked a headache in order to retire to his room.   Waiting until Radcliffe got caught up in his work and the guards changed shifts to slip out.   Gone was his normal suit, rather a simple jeans, t shirt, hoodie, ball cap, and sunglasses to conceal his identity as he strolled into a nearby park.  Intent on soaking up a bit of sun and fresh air before he was missed.

There he sat on a bench overlooking a pond with the comb from Jemma in his hands as he read the phrase over and over.  

Come back to me.

He could hear her saying it now, her voice pleading with him.  Even more he could almost see it in his minds eye.   A darkened room and an overwhelming fear for her safety that nearly made him ill.   

Fitz was started from his thoughts when he suddenly had company on his bench. The man was dressed similarly to him, though his T Shirt brought a small smile to Fitz’s face, Damn the Yanks. Fitz was about to comment when the man moved closer to him and Fitz felt the cold barrel of a gun pressing into his side.  

“You’re a hard man to find Doctor Fitz.  The boss has been beside herself since daddy dear locked you away in his ivory tower,” the man said.  His accent distinctly British.

Fitz tried to pull away but the mans free arm latched onto his.  “Now Mate, you don’t need to make this hard. Believe it or not I’m saving you.”

“Says the man with a gun to me,” Fitz snapped.  “I won’t work for whoever has—“

“As much as you want to play defiant little hostage now is not the time. Now up, we’re going for a ride. There is someone who is more than anxious to see you and for the sake of everyone on the base’s sanity its high time we got you back to her.”   Fitz felt himself being pulled up and to anyone passing by it looked as if they were simply taking a stroll side by side.  

“Jemma,” Fitz breathed without even thinking.  

The man smiled, “The one and only.  And I thought the demonic hell beast I married was scary when she was after something.  I’m Hunter by the way.”

Fitz stumbled at the name as more flashed assaulted him.  

Beers

High Fives

Documentaries…what the bloody hell did documentaries have to do with all this?

“My father,” Fitz said seeing a black van waiting for them as they came to the exit.  “He’ll—“

Hunter snorted “Last time I checked abducting someone and wiping their memories to fill some sort of twisted fantasy does not make one a father.”  

Fitz wanted to press further but they had arrived at the van.  If he was going to run now was the time.  And just as he was about to execute one of the moves Ward had showed him should he ever find himself in such a position he felt something bite into his arm.  

Shocked he looked to see Hunter pulling out a syringe.  The darkness came quickly and he collapsed into the other mans arms.  

88888888888888

The darkness had started to ebb.  

Fitz first becoming aware of just how warm and comfortable he was. The smell of lavender was just right and the fingers in his hair were gentle, soothing even.  

Jemma’s voice broke through next.  “Come on Fitz, open your eyes.  Its just you and me now, we can fix this together, just like we always do—“

More flashes assaulted him, this time it was almost painful with the furiosity in which they hit.  A lifetime of memories he had thought was just a dream.  

“If you wake up I’ve made you your favorite sandwich—“

His yes flew open and bore into hers.  Tears welling as his memories battled.   It was as if Radcliffe and Jemma were fighting for control of his mind and who he was. “With your homemade pesto ailoi,” he asked, not sure where the question had come from.  

Tears steamed down her cheek, “Just a hint.”

Those three words broke the dam and he shuddered at the onslaught of memories.  His fingers gripping his head and he was unable to contain the cry of pain.  Jemma was there as she cradled him in her arms.  “I know,” she said through tears of her own.  This wasn’t the first time she’d seen the process.   Already watching Coulson, May, Mack and Mace fight their way back.  Fitz had been last simply because they couldn’t get to him thanks to Radcliffe.  “I’m right here, it will be over soon, just let them come.”

Fitz didn’t fight them, rather embraced them, because despite the pain, the hole in his heart was filling.  Jemma, it was Jemma he had been missing.   “Jemma, how could I forget you…us” he cried as she held him.  

She didn’t answer, unable or unwilling to say what all AIDA and Radcliffe had done to him.  Instead she simply kissed the top of his head until it had passed.

Never again she vowed.  She wouldn’t come this close to losing him ever again.

8888888888

After what felt like an eternity he was finally there, before her in flesh in and blood.   Solid and whole in her arms in a way ones and zeros could never hope to replicate.  

It had taken them nearly a day to get to them once Radcliffe had finally given up their location.   Nearly a day to get Talbots help to attack the base.  And hours to battle their way through the snake pit AIDA had created to protect the Framework.  

But it was all worth it now.  Fitz was once again in her arms slowly but surely coming out of the Framework with the others.  

Jemma knew she should be monitoring the others but she couldn’t bear to pull herself from his side.  Besides they weren’t alone.  Elena was with Mack, Davis with Mace, Piper with May, and Daisy with Coulson.   Each one ready to ease them from their captivity and make sure their bodies adjusted to waking up.  

“Come on Fitz,” Jemma coaxed seeing his eyes move rapidly beneath his eyelids and his heart rate escalate.   When she had been forced to leave him in the Framework he was safely hidden away in the Playground.  But time was of the essence as Hydra was had been searching for all of them.  There was no way to tell if they had been too late until they woke up.

Fitz groaned, his fingers working to grasp her own as he began to fight the drugs hold in earnest.  “That’s it, come back to me.” Jemma encouraged and let out a sob as his eyes finally fluttered open.

“Jemma,” he moaned and Jemma eased him out of the cradle to the floor, intent on checking every inch of him over to make sure he hasn’t been harmed in his initial abduction.  

Fitz however had other ideas.  He pulled her into his arms and sobbed against her neck.  Jemma catching only snippets of “I’m so sorrys, I love you, and we can’t do this anymore,” between his gasps.  Jemma herself had said each and every one of those things to his sleeping form in the Framework after Hunter had brought him in.  And again as they’d arrived at their sides here.  

Jemma allowed tears of her own to fall and she pulled him tighter. No matter how close he was it didn’t feel like it would be enough.   She feared if she let go he would disappear once more and she would wake up alone in her bed in the Framework once more.  

“Fitz,” She said between her tears pulling him back enough to take his face in her hands.  Her fingers scraping though his now too long stubble in a gesture that mirrored their first kiss.  “My answer is yes,” she said before she captured his lips with her own.  “Whenever you are ready, my answer is yes.  I can’t, I won’t lose you ever again.”  

Fitz finally had a small smile play on his lips with his forehead resting against hers.   “No here, not now, but soon, I promise.  For now, I just want to hold you, I need to know this is real.”  

Jemma smiled and kissed him again.  “My dear Fitz, what we have is real no matter the universe we are in.  And I will wait.  Be it ten minutes, ten hours, ten days, or another ten years.  No matter when you ask my answer will be, yes.”

End

[sneaky-mermaid-renegade]

Reflect

  Heres a story I wrote. Its my first one so prepare to cringe, i guess. But at the same time, plz enjoy!

 Mirrors. Little plates of glass meant to show reflections. They are said that your reflection in a mirror is actually your soul. You dont believe that though. In fact you always believed the opposite: that mirrors dont always show whats really there! Although really you've never proven it, but no one has proved the soul thing either, so you think your fine

   Growing up, you were lucky enough that you never really had to deal with your eisoptrophobia due to a lack of mirrors in your house. Although that may change very soon. Your father has recently come into a large sum of money. He intends to use it to buy a new house, so you and him can move out of your small, beat up, apartment. You haven't seen the new house yet, but your father says its “Victorian”. You dont know what that means exactly, but it sounds old. “Are you okay sweetie?” your dad asks, bringing you out of your thoughts. “yeah, Im good.” you answer. You stare outside the window of the car, watching the trees blur by. “Are we almost there?” you ask absentmindedly. “As a matter a fact its right there!” your dad said enthusiastically. He pointed ahead to a big house off in the distance. It looked like a haunted mansion, except maybe a little smaller than a mansion. But not by a lot. 

   The car slows to a stop in your new driveway. You get out and start to haul some boxes inside. “You go on ahead and explore the house!” your father calls from behind the rest of the boxes, “I think ill probably be a while!”. You go up the stairs, and try to grasp the door knob from behind the boxes your carrying. You eventually grab the doorknob and open the door. Its very dusty inside, and there are spider webs everywhere. You think maybe it will look better after a good dusting. You search room after room to find one to claim. As you walk down a hallway lined with doors you realize one one side there is a big gap, as if there is supposed to be a door there. You set down your boxes and feel along the wallpaper for grooves of some sort. There isn't any, or to your knowledge anyway. Your not ruling out secret doors until you ask your dad about it. You turn your attention across the way to the door on the apposing side of the gap. Peeking in you see that, compared to the rest of the house, this room is in pretty good shape. You pick your boxes up and move them in your new bedroom!

                                       *                    *                     *

   You start to move some chairs inside. The moving van had just shown up a couple of minutes ago, so you and your dad are unpacking your stuff. You set the last chair down with a huff, and decide to go get your posters from the moving van. You climb in it, and search around, until you finally find it under some old picture frames. You bring it into your room and start hanging them up. The first one you take out is a picture of a lion sitting on a rock. You like lions. Mostly because of your zodiac being a Leo.                                                          

    You are about to grab another poster when you hear the loud sounds of a hammer outside your door. Your dad is hammering up an antique looking mirror on space across from you that was missing a door. “Oh, hello dear.” he says looking up. “what are you doing?” you ask confused. Your father puts his hammer down and steps to the side, revealing the mirror. It looked antique, and not very pretty. “I was hanging up this mirror here. I thought this little empty spot would be great for it!” You look at the nails holding up the weathered mirror. If they were holding the weight of the mirror without much effort, then that must mean there are support beams there. So much for a secret door. taking a step forward you peer into the mirrors glossy surface. For such an old mirror the glass was surprisingly clear, showing every detail of your face with crisp reflection. It made you uneasy. You turn towards your dad “Where did you get this mirror? I've never saw anything like this before.” Your dad grinned sheepishly. “Well technically its been locked up in the attic before you were born, your mother never liked it so i kinda just put it in the attic. I thought that since we moved it was time to put this thing back out into the open.”

   He picks up his hammer and leaves, leaving you alone with the mirror. You look into the mirror one last time before you turn to go into your room. Out of the corner of your eye you see something flash. You turn back around to see your reflection in the mirror, except somethings off. You almost look like . . . your glowing? You shudder and go back to your room to unpack. you never did like mirrors, and this one seemed very off.

   It was a couple days after you and your dad fully moved in. You lie awake in your bed staring at the ceiling. Finally you roll over and check your clock. It was 11:00 a.m. You decide you’ve been in bed for far too long, and climb out to eat some lunch. You walk into the kitchen and start making a sandwich. Your dad was watching some TV in his room. You feel like this day will be extremely uneventful.

   A knock on the door pulls you out of your thoughts. You open it up to see a kid about your age at the door. You couldn't tell if they were a boy or a girl. Due to the fact that they had short hair and a boyish build, but delicate hands and a girls figure. You decided it would be rude to ask. “hello!” you greeted cheerfully. “Hi.” they said. “I heard you were new to the block, and came to meet you.” They were giving you bad vibes, but you didn't want to be rude to the first neighbor you met so you let them in. “Um, here, this way. ill give you a tour!” you told them. You led them to the hallway that held your room. You deliberately looked to the opposite side if the mirror across the hall. It still gives you the creeps after all these days. You saw your guest peering looking in the direction of the mirror, enamored by their reflection. You briefly glance their way, shielding the mirror with your hand as you led their into your room. You were probably just imagining it but they almost looked relieved when you deliberately hid from the mirror.

   They peer around your room, carefully taking in the details. “You must really like lions.” they said peering around. You dont know how they figured that out. You have one lion poster, and two lion plushies, but you dont think that conveys how much you like lions. Either way you really wanted to make a good first impression on your new neighbor, so you bit your tongue and answered yes. “So I saw you shielding your eyes from that mirror. You dont like it?” You shifted uncomfortably. “I guess you could say i have a bad fear of mirrors.” You said awkwardly. “You know I know a legend about a Special mirror. Would you like to hear it?” You glanced at your shut door, imagining the glowing mirror outside. “Why, not?” You answer. “Stories are a good way to pass the time.”

   “Well.” she began. “A long time ago, there was a young women who was in love with her own reflection. She would sit in front of her mirrors for hours, sometimes even days, only getting up when she was hungry or thirsty. So it was a huge surprise when she took her eyes off her reflection, and began to watch a young man instead. She gave chase and they got married. But to the young mans dismay, her fling was short lived and she went back to her own reflection. The young man was furious and heartbroken. He wandered out of the town and into the woods to clear his head. The longer the women sat at her mirror, the deeper the man went into the woods. Until one day, the man stumbled upon an old lady in the forest. 

   She sat on the steps of her caravan, which was littered with random objects. She stood up and asked “What troubles you?” The man, frightened by this stranger, replied “Nothing troubles me, I am merely out for a stroll.” The lady only smiled and said “People can only find this place if they have a problem that troubles them. So tell me, what troubles you so?” The man sat down and sighed. “My wife no longer loves me, and instead prefers her own reflection than my company” The lady stood up from here caravan steps and brought down a mirror. She held it out to the man and said “Give this to her, it will reveal what she looks like on the inside. If she is still in love with herself after 3 days then, it will trap her in the mirror for an eternity” So the man took the mirror home to his wife and gave it to her, But she still stood in front of it for hours. “Surely my wife doesn't have a soul so pure she is still in love with herself” he thought to himself. So one the third day he slowly crept into the room and opened the door. She was in front of the mirror, but instead of her reflection, a women with similar features to her stood in the mirror. The mirror women had horns on her head and grey skin. But no matter how inhuman she looked the women could not take her eyes of of her. Suddenly the clock chimed. It was the end of the third day. The man watched helplessly as his wife was sucked into the mirror.

   The man gently touched the mirror in disbelief, but pulled back when he felt a sharp pain on his finger tips. When he looked back at the mirror there stood his wife. from that day on instead of his reflection, all he saw was his wife. She yelled at him whenever he saw him, begging him to get her out. The man grew bitter towards his wife, and by extension, mirrors. Eventually he gave in and went to find the caravan again. When he came upon it he asked the lady if there was any way to free his wife from the mirror. The women refused at first but after relentless begging the lady agreed to help. “take this powder and throw it at the mirror when you see her. She will emerge from the mirror as a child, but only for a century. During that century she will have to travel in search of someone with the opposite problem she has. Then she shall pass the curse to them. If she fails then she shall return to the mirror” So the man went home explained it to his wife and poured the powder on the mirror. The women immediately left for her journey, and was never seen again by the man, who eventually remarried. They says she wanders the earth to this day, looking for someone who hates mirrors as much as she had loved them”

   They finished their story, and i realized she had slowly pushed me into the hallway. I could see the glowing of my own reflection from the mirror behind me. Looking back at them I realized they had a sinister look on their face. “That young lady was me. I will be tied to this mirror no longer!” She shoved me into the mirror. A sharp pain shot through my back, so blindingly painful that I couldn't feel anything. I watched around me fade into black, the last thing I saw was their face as it lit up like Christmas lights that had broken through their plastic casing.

You woke up in a dark room. Dust flitted about, somehow giving off a dim glow, like a firefly. You cant remember anything. You dont remember your name, or your likes or even where you used to live. You look around and find a square of light penetrating the darkness. Its a view old looking hallway, lined with doors. In front of the mirror stands a boy, about your age. You bang on the glass, hoping to get his attention. He seems to stare right through you, almost as if he cant . . .see . . .you. ‘Oh no’ you think, backing away from the mirror. You'll be trapped here, forever! The boy in the hallway puts his hand on the glass before yanking it back, surprise tainting his face. He looks back to the mirror before scrambling away from it, in shock. He wont look at it again. He saw you. “Hey, Leo, the lion!” a girl sounding voice calls affectionately from down the hall. “help me unpack will you!”. “Leo” wanders away towards the voice, and you start to feel a little better about your situation. Although something about what the girl said is tugging at the back of your mind.

You like lions . . .

[shg11]

A lecture explaining why using our imaginations, and providing for others to use theirs, is an obligation for all citizens

Its important for people to tell you what side they are on and why, and whether they might be biased. A declaration of members interests, of a sort. So, I am going to be talking to you about reading. Im going to tell you that libraries are important. Im going to suggest that reading fiction, that reading for pleasure, is one of the most important things one can do. Im going to make an impassioned plea for people to understand what libraries and librarians are, and to preserve both of these things.

And I am biased, obviously and enormously: Im an author, often an author of fiction. I write for children and for adults. For about 30 years I have been earning my living through my words, mostly by making things up and writing them down. It is obviously in my interest for people to read, for them to read fiction, for libraries and librarians to exist and help foster a love of reading and places in which reading can occur.

So Im biased as a writer. But I am much, much more biased as a reader. And I am even more biased as a British citizen.

And Im here giving this talk tonight, under the auspices of the Reading Agency: a charity whose mission is to give everyone an equal chance in life by helping people become confident and enthusiastic readers. Which supports literacy programs, and libraries and individuals and nakedly and wantonly encourages the act of reading. Because, they tell us, everything changes when we read.

And its that change, and that act of reading that Im here to talk about tonight. I want to talk about what reading does. What its good for.

I was once in New York, and I listened to a talk about the building of private prisons a huge growth industry in America. The prison industry needs to plan its future growth how many cells are they going to need? How many prisoners are there going to be, 15 years from now? And they found they could predict it very easily, using a pretty simple algorithm, based on asking what percentage of 10 and 11-year-olds couldnt read. And certainly couldnt read for pleasure.

Its not one to one: you cant say that a literate society has no criminality. But there are very real correlations.

And I think some of those correlations, the simplest, come from something very simple. Literate people read fiction.

Fiction has two uses. Firstly, its a gateway drug to reading. The drive to know what happens next, to want to turn the page, the need to keep going, even if its hard, because someones in trouble and you have to know how its all going to end thats a very real drive. And it forces you to learn new words, to think new thoughts, to keep going. To discover that reading per se is pleasurable. Once you learn that, youre on the road to reading everything. And reading is key. There were noises made briefly, a few years ago, about the idea that we were living in a post-literate world, in which the ability to make sense out of written words was somehow redundant, but those days are gone: words are more important than they ever were: we navigate the world with words, and as the world slips onto the web, we need to follow, to communicate and to comprehend what we are reading. People who cannot understand each other cannot exchange ideas, cannot communicate, and translation programs only go so far.

The simplest way to make sure that we raise literate children is to teach them to read, and to show them that reading is a pleasurable activity. And that means, at its simplest, finding books that they enjoy, giving them access to those books, and letting them read them.

I dont think there is such a thing as a bad book for children. Every now and again it becomes fashionable among some adults to point at a subset of childrens books, a genre, perhaps, or an author, and to declare them bad books, books that children should be stopped from reading. Ive seen it happen over and over; Enid Blyton was declared a bad author, so was RL Stine, so were dozens of others. Comics have been decried as fostering illiteracy.

No such thing as a bad writer... Enid Blytons Famous Five. Photograph: Greg Balfour Evans/Alamy

Its tosh. Its snobbery and its foolishness. There are no bad authors for children, that children like and want to read and seek out, because every child is different. They can find the stories they need to, and they bring themselves to stories. A hackneyed, worn-out idea isnt hackneyed and worn out to them. This is the first time the child has encountered it. Do not discourage children from reading because you feel they are reading the wrong thing. Fiction you do not like is a route to other books you may prefer. And not everyone has the same taste as you.

Well-meaning adults can easily destroy a childs love of reading: stop them reading what they enjoy, or give them worthy-but-dull books that you like, the 21st-century equivalents of Victorian improving literature. Youll wind up with a generation convinced that reading is uncool and worse, unpleasant.

We need our children to get onto the reading ladder: anything that they enjoy reading will move them up, rung by rung, into literacy. (Also, do not do what this author did when his 11-year-old daughter was into RL Stine, which is to go and get a copy of Stephen Kings Carrie, saying if you liked those youll love this! Holly read nothing but safe stories of settlers on prairies for the rest of her teenage years, and still glares at me when Stephen Kings name is mentioned.)

And the second thing fiction does is to build empathy. When you watch TV or see a film, you are looking at things happening to other people. Prose fiction is something you build up from 26 letters and a handful of punctuation marks, and you, and you alone, using your imagination, create a world and people it and look out through other eyes. You get to feel things, visit places and worlds you would never otherwise know. You learn that everyone else out there is a me, as well. Youre being someone else, and when you return to your own world, youre going to be slightly changed.

Empathy is a tool for building people into groups, for allowing us to function as more than self-obsessed individuals.

Youre also finding out something as you read vitally important for making your way in the world. And its this:

The world doesnt have to be like this. Things can be different.

I was in China in 2007, at the first party-approved science fiction and fantasy convention in Chinese history. And at one point I took a top official aside and asked him Why? SF had been disapproved of for a long time. What had changed?

Its simple, he told me. The Chinese were brilliant at making things if other people brought them the plans. But they did not innovate and they did not invent. They did not imagine. So they sent a delegation to the US, to Apple, to Microsoft, to Google, and they asked the people there who were inventing the future about themselves. And they found that all of them had read science fiction when they were boys or girls.

Fiction can show you a different world. It can take you somewhere youve never been. Once youve visited other worlds, like those who ate fairy fruit, you can never be entirely content with the world that you grew up in. Discontent is a good thing: discontented people can modify and improve their worlds, leave them better, leave them different.

And while were on the subject, Id like to say a few words about escapism. I hear the term bandied about as if its a bad thing. As if escapist fiction is a cheap opiate used by the muddled and the foolish and the deluded, and the only fiction that is worthy, for adults or for children, is mimetic fiction, mirroring the worst of the world the reader finds herself in.

If you were trapped in an impossible situation, in an unpleasant place, with people who meant you ill, and someone offered you a temporary escape, why wouldnt you take it? And escapist fiction is just that: fiction that opens a door, shows the sunlight outside, gives you a place to go where you are in control, are with people you want to be with(and books are real places, make no mistake about that); and more importantly, during your escape, books can also give you knowledge about the world and your predicament, give you weapons, give you armour: real things you can take back into your prison. Skills and knowledge and tools you can use to escape for real.

As JRR Tolkien reminded us, the only people who inveigh against escape are jailers.

Tolkiens illustration of Bilbos home, Bag End. Photograph: HarperCollins

Another way to destroy a childs love of reading, of course, is to make sure there are no books of any kind around. And to give them nowhere to read those books. I was lucky. I had an excellent local library growing up. I had the kind of parents who could be persuaded to drop me off in the library on their way to work in summer holidays, and the kind of librarians who did not mind a small, unaccompanied boy heading back into the childrens library every morning and working his way through the card catalogue, looking for books with ghosts or magic or rockets in them, looking for vampires or detectives or witches or wonders. And when I had finished reading the childrens library I began on the adult books.

They were good librarians. They liked books and they liked the books being read. They taught me how to order books from other libraries on inter-library loans. They had no snobbery about anything I read. They just seemed to like that there was this wide-eyed little boy who loved to read, and would talk to me about the books I was reading, they would find me other books in a series, they would help. They treated me as another reader nothing less or more which meant they treated me with respect. I was not used to being treated with respect as an eight-year-old.

But libraries are about freedom. Freedom to read, freedom of ideas, freedom of communication. They are about education (which is not a process that finishes the day we leave school or university), about entertainment, about making safe spaces, and about access to information.

I worry that here in the 21st century people misunderstand what libraries are and the purpose of them. If you perceive a library as a shelf of books, it may seem antiquated or outdated in a world in which most, but not all, books in print exist digitally. But that is to miss the point fundamentally.

I think it has to do with nature of information. Information has value, and the right information has enormous value. For all of human history, we have lived in a time of information scarcity, and having the needed information was always important, and always worth something: when to plant crops, where to find things, maps and histories and stories they were always good for a meal and company. Information was a valuable thing, and those who had it or could obtain it could charge for that service.

In the last few years, weve moved from an information-scarce economy to one driven by an information glut. According to Eric Schmidt of Google, every two days now the human race creates as much information as we did from the dawn of civilisation until 2003. Thats about five exobytes of data a day, for those of you keeping score. The challenge becomes, not finding that scarce plant growing in the desert, but finding a specific plant growing in a jungle. We are going to need help navigating that information to find the thing we actually need.

Photograph: Alamy

Libraries are places that people go to for information. Books are only the tip of the information iceberg: they are there, and libraries can provide you freely and legally with books. More children are borrowing books from libraries than ever before books of all kinds: paper and digital and audio. But libraries are also, for example, places that people, who may not have computers, who may not have internet connections, can go online without paying anything: hugely important when the way you find out about jobs, apply for jobs or apply for benefits is increasingly migrating exclusively online. Librarians can help these people navigate that world.

I do not believe that all books will or should migrate onto screens: as Douglas Adams once pointed out to me, more than 20 years before the Kindle turned up, a physical book is like a shark. Sharks are old: there were sharks in the ocean before the dinosaurs. And the reason there are still sharks around is that sharks are better at being sharks than anything else is. Physical books are tough, hard to destroy, bath-resistant, solar-operated, feel good in your hand: they are good at being books, and there will always be a place for them. They belong in libraries, just as libraries have already become places you can go to get access to ebooks, and audiobooks and DVDs and web content.

A library is a place that is a repository of information and gives every citizen equal access to it. That includes health information. And mental health information. Its a community space. Its a place of safety, a haven from the world. Its a place with librarians in it. What the libraries of the future will be like is something we should be imagining now.

Literacy is more important than ever it was, in this world of text and email, a world of written information. We need to read and write, we need global citizens who can read comfortably, comprehend what they are reading, understand nuance, and make themselves understood.

Libraries really are the gates to the future. So it is unfortunate that, round the world, we observe local authorities seizing the opportunity to close libraries as an easy way to save money, without realising that they are stealing from the future to pay for today. They are closing the gates that should be open.

According to a recent study by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, England is the only country where the oldest age group has higher proficiency in both literacy and numeracy than the youngest group, after other factors, such as gender, socio-economic backgrounds and type of occupations are taken into account.

Or to put it another way, our children and our grandchildren are less literate and less numerate than we are. They are less able to navigate the world, to understand it to solve problems. They can be more easily lied to and misled, will be less able to change the world in which they find themselves, be less employable. All of these things. And as a country, England will fall behind other developed nations because it will lack a skilled workforce.

Books are the way that we communicate with the dead. The way that we learn lessons from those who are no longer with us, that humanity has built on itself, progressed, made knowledge incremental rather than something that has to be relearned, over and over. There are tales that are older than most countries, tales that have long outlasted the cultures and the buildings in which they were first told.

I think we have responsibilities to the future. Responsibilities and obligations to children, to the adults those children will become, to the world they will find themselves inhabiting. All of us as readers, as writers, as citizens have obligations. I thought Id try and spell out some of these obligations here.

I believe we have an obligation to read for pleasure, in private and in public places. If we read for pleasure, if others see us reading, then we learn, we exercise our imaginations. We show others that reading is a good thing.

We have an obligation to support libraries. To use libraries, to encourage others to use libraries, to protest the closure of libraries. If you do not value libraries then you do not value information or culture or wisdom. You are silencing the voices of the past and you are damaging the future.

We have an obligation to read aloud to our children. To read them things they enjoy. To read to them stories we are already tired of. To do the voices, to make it interesting, and not to stop reading to them just because they learn to read to themselves. Use reading-aloud time as bonding time, as time when no phones are being checked, when the distractions of the world are put aside.

We have an obligation to use the language. To push ourselves: to find out what words mean and how to deploy them, to communicate clearly, to say what we mean. We must not to attempt to freeze language, or to pretend it is a dead thing that must be revered, but we should use it as a living thing, that flows, that borrows words, that allows meanings and pronunciations to change with time.

We writers and especially writers for children, but all writers have an obligation to our readers: its the obligation to write true things, especially important when we are creating tales of people who do not exist in places that never were to understand that truth is not in what happens but what it tells us about who we are. Fiction is the lie that tells the truth, after all. We have an obligation not to bore our readers, but to make them need to turn the pages. One of the best cures for a reluctant reader, after all, is a tale they cannot stop themselves from reading. And while we must tell our readers true things and give them weapons and give them armour and pass on whatever wisdom we have gleaned from our short stay on this green world, we have an obligation not to preach, not to lecture, not to force predigested morals and messages down our readers throats like adult birds feeding their babies pre-masticated maggots; and we have an obligation never, ever, under any circumstances, to write anything for children that we would not want to read ourselves.

We have an obligation to understand and to acknowledge that as writers for children we are doing important work, because if we mess it up and write dull books that turn children away from reading and from books, we ve lessened our own future and diminished theirs.

We all adults and children, writers and readers have an obligation to daydream. We have an obligation to imagine. It is easy to pretend that nobody can change anything, that we are in a world in which society is huge and the individual is less than nothing: an atom in a wall, a grain of rice in a rice field. But the truth is, individuals change their world over and over, individuals make the future, and they do it by imagining that things can be different.

Look around you: I mean it. Pause, for a moment and look around the room that you are in. Im going to point out something so obvious that it tends to be forgotten. Its this: that everything you can see, including the walls, was, at some point, imagined. Someone decided it was easier to sit on a chair than on the ground and imagined the chair. Someone had to imagine a way that I could talk to you in London right now without us all getting rained on.This room and the things in it, and all the other things in this building, this city, exist because, over and over and over, people imagined things.

We have an obligation to make things beautiful. Not to leave the world uglier than we found it, not to empty the oceans, not to leave our problems for the next generation. We have an obligation to clean up after ourselves, and not leave our children with a world weve shortsightedly messed up, shortchanged, and crippled.

We have an obligation to tell our politicians what we want, to vote against politicians of whatever party who do not understand the value of reading in creating worthwhile citizens, who do not want to act to preserve and protect knowledge and encourage literacy. This is not a matter of party politics. This is a matter of common humanity.

Albert Einstein was asked once how we could make our children intelligent. His reply was both simple and wise. If you want your children to be intelligent, he said, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales. He understood the value of reading, and of imagining. I hope we can give our children a world in which they will read, and be read to, and imagine, and understand.

This is an edited version of Neil Gaimans lecture for the Reading Agency, delivered on Monday October 14 at the Barbican in London. The Reading Agencys annual lecture series was initiated in 2012 as a platform for leading writers and thinkers to share original, challenging ideas about reading and libraries.

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/oct/15/neil-gaiman-future-libraries-reading-daydreaming

[trendingnewsb]

Neil Gaiman: Why our future depends on libraries, reading and daydreaming

A lecture explaining why using our imaginations, and providing for others to use theirs, is an obligation for all citizens

Its important for people to tell you what side they are on and why, and whether they might be biased. A declaration of members interests, of a sort. So, I am going to be talking to you about reading. Im going to tell you that libraries are important. Im going to suggest that reading fiction, that reading for pleasure, is one of the most important things one can do. Im going to make an impassioned plea for people to understand what libraries and librarians are, and to preserve both of these things.

And I am biased, obviously and enormously: Im an author, often an author of fiction. I write for children and for adults. For about 30 years I have been earning my living through my words, mostly by making things up and writing them down. It is obviously in my interest for people to read, for them to read fiction, for libraries and librarians to exist and help foster a love of reading and places in which reading can occur.

So Im biased as a writer. But I am much, much more biased as a reader. And I am even more biased as a British citizen.

And Im here giving this talk tonight, under the auspices of the Reading Agency: a charity whose mission is to give everyone an equal chance in life by helping people become confident and enthusiastic readers. Which supports literacy programs, and libraries and individuals and nakedly and wantonly encourages the act of reading. Because, they tell us, everything changes when we read.

And its that change, and that act of reading that Im here to talk about tonight. I want to talk about what reading does. What its good for.

I was once in New York, and I listened to a talk about the building of private prisons a huge growth industry in America. The prison industry needs to plan its future growth how many cells are they going to need? How many prisoners are there going to be, 15 years from now? And they found they could predict it very easily, using a pretty simple algorithm, based on asking what percentage of 10 and 11-year-olds couldnt read. And certainly couldnt read for pleasure.

Its not one to one: you cant say that a literate society has no criminality. But there are very real correlations.

And I think some of those correlations, the simplest, come from something very simple. Literate people read fiction.

Fiction has two uses. Firstly, its a gateway drug to reading. The drive to know what happens next, to want to turn the page, the need to keep going, even if its hard, because someones in trouble and you have to know how its all going to end thats a very real drive. And it forces you to learn new words, to think new thoughts, to keep going. To discover that reading per se is pleasurable. Once you learn that, youre on the road to reading everything. And reading is key. There were noises made briefly, a few years ago, about the idea that we were living in a post-literate world, in which the ability to make sense out of written words was somehow redundant, but those days are gone: words are more important than they ever were: we navigate the world with words, and as the world slips onto the web, we need to follow, to communicate and to comprehend what we are reading. People who cannot understand each other cannot exchange ideas, cannot communicate, and translation programs only go so far.

The simplest way to make sure that we raise literate children is to teach them to read, and to show them that reading is a pleasurable activity. And that means, at its simplest, finding books that they enjoy, giving them access to those books, and letting them read them.

I dont think there is such a thing as a bad book for children. Every now and again it becomes fashionable among some adults to point at a subset of childrens books, a genre, perhaps, or an author, and to declare them bad books, books that children should be stopped from reading. Ive seen it happen over and over; Enid Blyton was declared a bad author, so was RL Stine, so were dozens of others. Comics have been decried as fostering illiteracy.

No such thing as a bad writer… Enid Blytons Famous Five. Photograph: Greg Balfour Evans/Alamy

Its tosh. Its snobbery and its foolishness. There are no bad authors for children, that children like and want to read and seek out, because every child is different. They can find the stories they need to, and they bring themselves to stories. A hackneyed, worn-out idea isnt hackneyed and worn out to them. This is the first time the child has encountered it. Do not discourage children from reading because you feel they are reading the wrong thing. Fiction you do not like is a route to other books you may prefer. And not everyone has the same taste as you.

Well-meaning adults can easily destroy a childs love of reading: stop them reading what they enjoy, or give them worthy-but-dull books that you like, the 21st-century equivalents of Victorian improving literature. Youll wind up with a generation convinced that reading is uncool and worse, unpleasant.

We need our children to get onto the reading ladder: anything that they enjoy reading will move them up, rung by rung, into literacy. (Also, do not do what this author did when his 11-year-old daughter was into RL Stine, which is to go and get a copy of Stephen Kings Carrie, saying if you liked those youll love this! Holly read nothing but safe stories of settlers on prairies for the rest of her teenage years, and still glares at me when Stephen Kings name is mentioned.)

And the second thing fiction does is to build empathy. When you watch TV or see a film, you are looking at things happening to other people. Prose fiction is something you build up from 26 letters and a handful of punctuation marks, and you, and you alone, using your imagination, create a world and people it and look out through other eyes. You get to feel things, visit places and worlds you would never otherwise know. You learn that everyone else out there is a me, as well. Youre being someone else, and when you return to your own world, youre going to be slightly changed.

Empathy is a tool for building people into groups, for allowing us to function as more than self-obsessed individuals.

Youre also finding out something as you read vitally important for making your way in the world. And its this:

The world doesnt have to be like this. Things can be different.

I was in China in 2007, at the first party-approved science fiction and fantasy convention in Chinese history. And at one point I took a top official aside and asked him Why? SF had been disapproved of for a long time. What had changed?

Its simple, he told me. The Chinese were brilliant at making things if other people brought them the plans. But they did not innovate and they did not invent. They did not imagine. So they sent a delegation to the US, to Apple, to Microsoft, to Google, and they asked the people there who were inventing the future about themselves. And they found that all of them had read science fiction when they were boys or girls.

Fiction can show you a different world. It can take you somewhere youve never been. Once youve visited other worlds, like those who ate fairy fruit, you can never be entirely content with the world that you grew up in. Discontent is a good thing: discontented people can modify and improve their worlds, leave them better, leave them different.

And while were on the subject, Id like to say a few words about escapism. I hear the term bandied about as if its a bad thing. As if escapist fiction is a cheap opiate used by the muddled and the foolish and the deluded, and the only fiction that is worthy, for adults or for children, is mimetic fiction, mirroring the worst of the world the reader finds herself in.

If you were trapped in an impossible situation, in an unpleasant place, with people who meant you ill, and someone offered you a temporary escape, why wouldnt you take it? And escapist fiction is just that: fiction that opens a door, shows the sunlight outside, gives you a place to go where you are in control, are with people you want to be with(and books are real places, make no mistake about that); and more importantly, during your escape, books can also give you knowledge about the world and your predicament, give you weapons, give you armour: real things you can take back into your prison. Skills and knowledge and tools you can use to escape for real.

As JRR Tolkien reminded us, the only people who inveigh against escape are jailers.

Tolkiens illustration of Bilbos home, Bag End. Photograph: HarperCollins

Another way to destroy a childs love of reading, of course, is to make sure there are no books of any kind around. And to give them nowhere to read those books. I was lucky. I had an excellent local library growing up. I had the kind of parents who could be persuaded to drop me off in the library on their way to work in summer holidays, and the kind of librarians who did not mind a small, unaccompanied boy heading back into the childrens library every morning and working his way through the card catalogue, looking for books with ghosts or magic or rockets in them, looking for vampires or detectives or witches or wonders. And when I had finished reading the childrens library I began on the adult books.

They were good librarians. They liked books and they liked the books being read. They taught me how to order books from other libraries on inter-library loans. They had no snobbery about anything I read. They just seemed to like that there was this wide-eyed little boy who loved to read, and would talk to me about the books I was reading, they would find me other books in a series, they would help. They treated me as another reader nothing less or more which meant they treated me with respect. I was not used to being treated with respect as an eight-year-old.

But libraries are about freedom. Freedom to read, freedom of ideas, freedom of communication. They are about education (which is not a process that finishes the day we leave school or university), about entertainment, about making safe spaces, and about access to information.

I worry that here in the 21st century people misunderstand what libraries are and the purpose of them. If you perceive a library as a shelf of books, it may seem antiquated or outdated in a world in which most, but not all, books in print exist digitally. But that is to miss the point fundamentally.

I think it has to do with nature of information. Information has value, and the right information has enormous value. For all of human history, we have lived in a time of information scarcity, and having the needed information was always important, and always worth something: when to plant crops, where to find things, maps and histories and stories they were always good for a meal and company. Information was a valuable thing, and those who had it or could obtain it could charge for that service.

In the last few years, weve moved from an information-scarce economy to one driven by an information glut. According to Eric Schmidt of Google, every two days now the human race creates as much information as we did from the dawn of civilisation until 2003. Thats about five exobytes of data a day, for those of you keeping score. The challenge becomes, not finding that scarce plant growing in the desert, but finding a specific plant growing in a jungle. We are going to need help navigating that information to find the thing we actually need.

Photograph: Alamy

Libraries are places that people go to for information. Books are only the tip of the information iceberg: they are there, and libraries can provide you freely and legally with books. More children are borrowing books from libraries than ever before books of all kinds: paper and digital and audio. But libraries are also, for example, places that people, who may not have computers, who may not have internet connections, can go online without paying anything: hugely important when the way you find out about jobs, apply for jobs or apply for benefits is increasingly migrating exclusively online. Librarians can help these people navigate that world.

I do not believe that all books will or should migrate onto screens: as Douglas Adams once pointed out to me, more than 20 years before the Kindle turned up, a physical book is like a shark. Sharks are old: there were sharks in the ocean before the dinosaurs. And the reason there are still sharks around is that sharks are better at being sharks than anything else is. Physical books are tough, hard to destroy, bath-resistant, solar-operated, feel good in your hand: they are good at being books, and there will always be a place for them. They belong in libraries, just as libraries have already become places you can go to get access to ebooks, and audiobooks and DVDs and web content.

A library is a place that is a repository of information and gives every citizen equal access to it. That includes health information. And mental health information. Its a community space. Its a place of safety, a haven from the world. Its a place with librarians in it. What the libraries of the future will be like is something we should be imagining now.

Literacy is more important than ever it was, in this world of text and email, a world of written information. We need to read and write, we need global citizens who can read comfortably, comprehend what they are reading, understand nuance, and make themselves understood.

Libraries really are the gates to the future. So it is unfortunate that, round the world, we observe local authorities seizing the opportunity to close libraries as an easy way to save money, without realising that they are stealing from the future to pay for today. They are closing the gates that should be open.

According to a recent study by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, England is the only country where the oldest age group has higher proficiency in both literacy and numeracy than the youngest group, after other factors, such as gender, socio-economic backgrounds and type of occupations are taken into account.

Or to put it another way, our children and our grandchildren are less literate and less numerate than we are. They are less able to navigate the world, to understand it to solve problems. They can be more easily lied to and misled, will be less able to change the world in which they find themselves, be less employable. All of these things. And as a country, England will fall behind other developed nations because it will lack a skilled workforce.

Books are the way that we communicate with the dead. The way that we learn lessons from those who are no longer with us, that humanity has built on itself, progressed, made knowledge incremental rather than something that has to be relearned, over and over. There are tales that are older than most countries, tales that have long outlasted the cultures and the buildings in which they were first told.

I think we have responsibilities to the future. Responsibilities and obligations to children, to the adults those children will become, to the world they will find themselves inhabiting. All of us as readers, as writers, as citizens have obligations. I thought Id try and spell out some of these obligations here.

I believe we have an obligation to read for pleasure, in private and in public places. If we read for pleasure, if others see us reading, then we learn, we exercise our imaginations. We show others that reading is a good thing.

We have an obligation to support libraries. To use libraries, to encourage others to use libraries, to protest the closure of libraries. If you do not value libraries then you do not value information or culture or wisdom. You are silencing the voices of the past and you are damaging the future.

We have an obligation to read aloud to our children. To read them things they enjoy. To read to them stories we are already tired of. To do the voices, to make it interesting, and not to stop reading to them just because they learn to read to themselves. Use reading-aloud time as bonding time, as time when no phones are being checked, when the distractions of the world are put aside.

We have an obligation to use the language. To push ourselves: to find out what words mean and how to deploy them, to communicate clearly, to say what we mean. We must not to attempt to freeze language, or to pretend it is a dead thing that must be revered, but we should use it as a living thing, that flows, that borrows words, that allows meanings and pronunciations to change with time.

We writers and especially writers for children, but all writers have an obligation to our readers: its the obligation to write true things, especially important when we are creating tales of people who do not exist in places that never were to understand that truth is not in what happens but what it tells us about who we are. Fiction is the lie that tells the truth, after all. We have an obligation not to bore our readers, but to make them need to turn the pages. One of the best cures for a reluctant reader, after all, is a tale they cannot stop themselves from reading. And while we must tell our readers true things and give them weapons and give them armour and pass on whatever wisdom we have gleaned from our short stay on this green world, we have an obligation not to preach, not to lecture, not to force predigested morals and messages down our readers throats like adult birds feeding their babies pre-masticated maggots; and we have an obligation never, ever, under any circumstances, to write anything for children that we would not want to read ourselves.

We have an obligation to understand and to acknowledge that as writers for children we are doing important work, because if we mess it up and write dull books that turn children away from reading and from books, we ve lessened our own future and diminished theirs.

We all adults and children, writers and readers have an obligation to daydream. We have an obligation to imagine. It is easy to pretend that nobody can change anything, that we are in a world in which society is huge and the individual is less than nothing: an atom in a wall, a grain of rice in a rice field. But the truth is, individuals change their world over and over, individuals make the future, and they do it by imagining that things can be different.

Look around you: I mean it. Pause, for a moment and look around the room that you are in. Im going to point out something so obvious that it tends to be forgotten. Its this: that everything you can see, including the walls, was, at some point, imagined. Someone decided it was easier to sit on a chair than on the ground and imagined the chair. Someone had to imagine a way that I could talk to you in London right now without us all getting rained on.This room and the things in it, and all the other things in this building, this city, exist because, over and over and over, people imagined things.

We have an obligation to make things beautiful. Not to leave the world uglier than we found it, not to empty the oceans, not to leave our problems for the next generation. We have an obligation to clean up after ourselves, and not leave our children with a world weve shortsightedly messed up, shortchanged, and crippled.

We have an obligation to tell our politicians what we want, to vote against politicians of whatever party who do not understand the value of reading in creating worthwhile citizens, who do not want to act to preserve and protect knowledge and encourage literacy. This is not a matter of party politics. This is a matter of common humanity.

Albert Einstein was asked once how we could make our children intelligent. His reply was both simple and wise. If you want your children to be intelligent, he said, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales. He understood the value of reading, and of imagining. I hope we can give our children a world in which they will read, and be read to, and imagine, and understand.

This is an edited version of Neil Gaimans lecture for the Reading Agency, delivered on Monday October 14 at the Barbican in London. The Reading Agencys annual lecture series was initiated in 2012 as a platform for leading writers and thinkers to share original, challenging ideas about reading and libraries.

Read more: http://ift.tt/1XBVCqY

from Viral News HQ http://ift.tt/2fHEi5i via Viral News HQ

[trendingnewsb]

Neil Gaiman: Why our future depends on libraries, reading and daydreaming

A lecture explaining why using our imaginations, and providing for others to use theirs, is an obligation for all citizens

Its important for people to tell you what side they are on and why, and whether they might be biased. A declaration of members interests, of a sort. So, I am going to be talking to you about reading. Im going to tell you that libraries are important. Im going to suggest that reading fiction, that reading for pleasure, is one of the most important things one can do. Im going to make an impassioned plea for people to understand what libraries and librarians are, and to preserve both of these things.

And I am biased, obviously and enormously: Im an author, often an author of fiction. I write for children and for adults. For about 30 years I have been earning my living through my words, mostly by making things up and writing them down. It is obviously in my interest for people to read, for them to read fiction, for libraries and librarians to exist and help foster a love of reading and places in which reading can occur.

So Im biased as a writer. But I am much, much more biased as a reader. And I am even more biased as a British citizen.

And Im here giving this talk tonight, under the auspices of the Reading Agency: a charity whose mission is to give everyone an equal chance in life by helping people become confident and enthusiastic readers. Which supports literacy programs, and libraries and individuals and nakedly and wantonly encourages the act of reading. Because, they tell us, everything changes when we read.

And its that change, and that act of reading that Im here to talk about tonight. I want to talk about what reading does. What its good for.

I was once in New York, and I listened to a talk about the building of private prisons a huge growth industry in America. The prison industry needs to plan its future growth how many cells are they going to need? How many prisoners are there going to be, 15 years from now? And they found they could predict it very easily, using a pretty simple algorithm, based on asking what percentage of 10 and 11-year-olds couldnt read. And certainly couldnt read for pleasure.

Its not one to one: you cant say that a literate society has no criminality. But there are very real correlations.

And I think some of those correlations, the simplest, come from something very simple. Literate people read fiction.

Fiction has two uses. Firstly, its a gateway drug to reading. The drive to know what happens next, to want to turn the page, the need to keep going, even if its hard, because someones in trouble and you have to know how its all going to end thats a very real drive. And it forces you to learn new words, to think new thoughts, to keep going. To discover that reading per se is pleasurable. Once you learn that, youre on the road to reading everything. And reading is key. There were noises made briefly, a few years ago, about the idea that we were living in a post-literate world, in which the ability to make sense out of written words was somehow redundant, but those days are gone: words are more important than they ever were: we navigate the world with words, and as the world slips onto the web, we need to follow, to communicate and to comprehend what we are reading. People who cannot understand each other cannot exchange ideas, cannot communicate, and translation programs only go so far.

The simplest way to make sure that we raise literate children is to teach them to read, and to show them that reading is a pleasurable activity. And that means, at its simplest, finding books that they enjoy, giving them access to those books, and letting them read them.

I dont think there is such a thing as a bad book for children. Every now and again it becomes fashionable among some adults to point at a subset of childrens books, a genre, perhaps, or an author, and to declare them bad books, books that children should be stopped from reading. Ive seen it happen over and over; Enid Blyton was declared a bad author, so was RL Stine, so were dozens of others. Comics have been decried as fostering illiteracy.

No such thing as a bad writer… Enid Blytons Famous Five. Photograph: Greg Balfour Evans/Alamy

Its tosh. Its snobbery and its foolishness. There are no bad authors for children, that children like and want to read and seek out, because every child is different. They can find the stories they need to, and they bring themselves to stories. A hackneyed, worn-out idea isnt hackneyed and worn out to them. This is the first time the child has encountered it. Do not discourage children from reading because you feel they are reading the wrong thing. Fiction you do not like is a route to other books you may prefer. And not everyone has the same taste as you.

Well-meaning adults can easily destroy a childs love of reading: stop them reading what they enjoy, or give them worthy-but-dull books that you like, the 21st-century equivalents of Victorian improving literature. Youll wind up with a generation convinced that reading is uncool and worse, unpleasant.

We need our children to get onto the reading ladder: anything that they enjoy reading will move them up, rung by rung, into literacy. (Also, do not do what this author did when his 11-year-old daughter was into RL Stine, which is to go and get a copy of Stephen Kings Carrie, saying if you liked those youll love this! Holly read nothing but safe stories of settlers on prairies for the rest of her teenage years, and still glares at me when Stephen Kings name is mentioned.)

And the second thing fiction does is to build empathy. When you watch TV or see a film, you are looking at things happening to other people. Prose fiction is something you build up from 26 letters and a handful of punctuation marks, and you, and you alone, using your imagination, create a world and people it and look out through other eyes. You get to feel things, visit places and worlds you would never otherwise know. You learn that everyone else out there is a me, as well. Youre being someone else, and when you return to your own world, youre going to be slightly changed.

Empathy is a tool for building people into groups, for allowing us to function as more than self-obsessed individuals.

Youre also finding out something as you read vitally important for making your way in the world. And its this:

The world doesnt have to be like this. Things can be different.

I was in China in 2007, at the first party-approved science fiction and fantasy convention in Chinese history. And at one point I took a top official aside and asked him Why? SF had been disapproved of for a long time. What had changed?

Its simple, he told me. The Chinese were brilliant at making things if other people brought them the plans. But they did not innovate and they did not invent. They did not imagine. So they sent a delegation to the US, to Apple, to Microsoft, to Google, and they asked the people there who were inventing the future about themselves. And they found that all of them had read science fiction when they were boys or girls.

Fiction can show you a different world. It can take you somewhere youve never been. Once youve visited other worlds, like those who ate fairy fruit, you can never be entirely content with the world that you grew up in. Discontent is a good thing: discontented people can modify and improve their worlds, leave them better, leave them different.

And while were on the subject, Id like to say a few words about escapism. I hear the term bandied about as if its a bad thing. As if escapist fiction is a cheap opiate used by the muddled and the foolish and the deluded, and the only fiction that is worthy, for adults or for children, is mimetic fiction, mirroring the worst of the world the reader finds herself in.

If you were trapped in an impossible situation, in an unpleasant place, with people who meant you ill, and someone offered you a temporary escape, why wouldnt you take it? And escapist fiction is just that: fiction that opens a door, shows the sunlight outside, gives you a place to go where you are in control, are with people you want to be with(and books are real places, make no mistake about that); and more importantly, during your escape, books can also give you knowledge about the world and your predicament, give you weapons, give you armour: real things you can take back into your prison. Skills and knowledge and tools you can use to escape for real.

As JRR Tolkien reminded us, the only people who inveigh against escape are jailers.

Tolkiens illustration of Bilbos home, Bag End. Photograph: HarperCollins

Another way to destroy a childs love of reading, of course, is to make sure there are no books of any kind around. And to give them nowhere to read those books. I was lucky. I had an excellent local library growing up. I had the kind of parents who could be persuaded to drop me off in the library on their way to work in summer holidays, and the kind of librarians who did not mind a small, unaccompanied boy heading back into the childrens library every morning and working his way through the card catalogue, looking for books with ghosts or magic or rockets in them, looking for vampires or detectives or witches or wonders. And when I had finished reading the childrens library I began on the adult books.

They were good librarians. They liked books and they liked the books being read. They taught me how to order books from other libraries on inter-library loans. They had no snobbery about anything I read. They just seemed to like that there was this wide-eyed little boy who loved to read, and would talk to me about the books I was reading, they would find me other books in a series, they would help. They treated me as another reader nothing less or more which meant they treated me with respect. I was not used to being treated with respect as an eight-year-old.

But libraries are about freedom. Freedom to read, freedom of ideas, freedom of communication. They are about education (which is not a process that finishes the day we leave school or university), about entertainment, about making safe spaces, and about access to information.

I worry that here in the 21st century people misunderstand what libraries are and the purpose of them. If you perceive a library as a shelf of books, it may seem antiquated or outdated in a world in which most, but not all, books in print exist digitally. But that is to miss the point fundamentally.

I think it has to do with nature of information. Information has value, and the right information has enormous value. For all of human history, we have lived in a time of information scarcity, and having the needed information was always important, and always worth something: when to plant crops, where to find things, maps and histories and stories they were always good for a meal and company. Information was a valuable thing, and those who had it or could obtain it could charge for that service.

In the last few years, weve moved from an information-scarce economy to one driven by an information glut. According to Eric Schmidt of Google, every two days now the human race creates as much information as we did from the dawn of civilisation until 2003. Thats about five exobytes of data a day, for those of you keeping score. The challenge becomes, not finding that scarce plant growing in the desert, but finding a specific plant growing in a jungle. We are going to need help navigating that information to find the thing we actually need.

Photograph: Alamy

Libraries are places that people go to for information. Books are only the tip of the information iceberg: they are there, and libraries can provide you freely and legally with books. More children are borrowing books from libraries than ever before books of all kinds: paper and digital and audio. But libraries are also, for example, places that people, who may not have computers, who may not have internet connections, can go online without paying anything: hugely important when the way you find out about jobs, apply for jobs or apply for benefits is increasingly migrating exclusively online. Librarians can help these people navigate that world.

I do not believe that all books will or should migrate onto screens: as Douglas Adams once pointed out to me, more than 20 years before the Kindle turned up, a physical book is like a shark. Sharks are old: there were sharks in the ocean before the dinosaurs. And the reason there are still sharks around is that sharks are better at being sharks than anything else is. Physical books are tough, hard to destroy, bath-resistant, solar-operated, feel good in your hand: they are good at being books, and there will always be a place for them. They belong in libraries, just as libraries have already become places you can go to get access to ebooks, and audiobooks and DVDs and web content.

A library is a place that is a repository of information and gives every citizen equal access to it. That includes health information. And mental health information. Its a community space. Its a place of safety, a haven from the world. Its a place with librarians in it. What the libraries of the future will be like is something we should be imagining now.

Literacy is more important than ever it was, in this world of text and email, a world of written information. We need to read and write, we need global citizens who can read comfortably, comprehend what they are reading, understand nuance, and make themselves understood.

Libraries really are the gates to the future. So it is unfortunate that, round the world, we observe local authorities seizing the opportunity to close libraries as an easy way to save money, without realising that they are stealing from the future to pay for today. They are closing the gates that should be open.

According to a recent study by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, England is the only country where the oldest age group has higher proficiency in both literacy and numeracy than the youngest group, after other factors, such as gender, socio-economic backgrounds and type of occupations are taken into account.

Or to put it another way, our children and our grandchildren are less literate and less numerate than we are. They are less able to navigate the world, to understand it to solve problems. They can be more easily lied to and misled, will be less able to change the world in which they find themselves, be less employable. All of these things. And as a country, England will fall behind other developed nations because it will lack a skilled workforce.

Books are the way that we communicate with the dead. The way that we learn lessons from those who are no longer with us, that humanity has built on itself, progressed, made knowledge incremental rather than something that has to be relearned, over and over. There are tales that are older than most countries, tales that have long outlasted the cultures and the buildings in which they were first told.

I think we have responsibilities to the future. Responsibilities and obligations to children, to the adults those children will become, to the world they will find themselves inhabiting. All of us as readers, as writers, as citizens have obligations. I thought Id try and spell out some of these obligations here.

I believe we have an obligation to read for pleasure, in private and in public places. If we read for pleasure, if others see us reading, then we learn, we exercise our imaginations. We show others that reading is a good thing.

We have an obligation to support libraries. To use libraries, to encourage others to use libraries, to protest the closure of libraries. If you do not value libraries then you do not value information or culture or wisdom. You are silencing the voices of the past and you are damaging the future.

We have an obligation to read aloud to our children. To read them things they enjoy. To read to them stories we are already tired of. To do the voices, to make it interesting, and not to stop reading to them just because they learn to read to themselves. Use reading-aloud time as bonding time, as time when no phones are being checked, when the distractions of the world are put aside.

We have an obligation to use the language. To push ourselves: to find out what words mean and how to deploy them, to communicate clearly, to say what we mean. We must not to attempt to freeze language, or to pretend it is a dead thing that must be revered, but we should use it as a living thing, that flows, that borrows words, that allows meanings and pronunciations to change with time.

We writers and especially writers for children, but all writers have an obligation to our readers: its the obligation to write true things, especially important when we are creating tales of people who do not exist in places that never were to understand that truth is not in what happens but what it tells us about who we are. Fiction is the lie that tells the truth, after all. We have an obligation not to bore our readers, but to make them need to turn the pages. One of the best cures for a reluctant reader, after all, is a tale they cannot stop themselves from reading. And while we must tell our readers true things and give them weapons and give them armour and pass on whatever wisdom we have gleaned from our short stay on this green world, we have an obligation not to preach, not to lecture, not to force predigested morals and messages down our readers throats like adult birds feeding their babies pre-masticated maggots; and we have an obligation never, ever, under any circumstances, to write anything for children that we would not want to read ourselves.

We have an obligation to understand and to acknowledge that as writers for children we are doing important work, because if we mess it up and write dull books that turn children away from reading and from books, we ve lessened our own future and diminished theirs.

We all adults and children, writers and readers have an obligation to daydream. We have an obligation to imagine. It is easy to pretend that nobody can change anything, that we are in a world in which society is huge and the individual is less than nothing: an atom in a wall, a grain of rice in a rice field. But the truth is, individuals change their world over and over, individuals make the future, and they do it by imagining that things can be different.

Look around you: I mean it. Pause, for a moment and look around the room that you are in. Im going to point out something so obvious that it tends to be forgotten. Its this: that everything you can see, including the walls, was, at some point, imagined. Someone decided it was easier to sit on a chair than on the ground and imagined the chair. Someone had to imagine a way that I could talk to you in London right now without us all getting rained on.This room and the things in it, and all the other things in this building, this city, exist because, over and over and over, people imagined things.

We have an obligation to make things beautiful. Not to leave the world uglier than we found it, not to empty the oceans, not to leave our problems for the next generation. We have an obligation to clean up after ourselves, and not leave our children with a world weve shortsightedly messed up, shortchanged, and crippled.

We have an obligation to tell our politicians what we want, to vote against politicians of whatever party who do not understand the value of reading in creating worthwhile citizens, who do not want to act to preserve and protect knowledge and encourage literacy. This is not a matter of party politics. This is a matter of common humanity.

Albert Einstein was asked once how we could make our children intelligent. His reply was both simple and wise. If you want your children to be intelligent, he said, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales. He understood the value of reading, and of imagining. I hope we can give our children a world in which they will read, and be read to, and imagine, and understand.

This is an edited version of Neil Gaimans lecture for the Reading Agency, delivered on Monday October 14 at the Barbican in London. The Reading Agencys annual lecture series was initiated in 2012 as a platform for leading writers and thinkers to share original, challenging ideas about reading and libraries.

Read more: http://ift.tt/1XBVCqY

from Viral News HQ http://ift.tt/2fHEi5i via Viral News HQ