Reading can be a small act of travel. A book can carry you from a library chair to a Berlin street, a war-scarred city, or a fictional world without requiring a ticket. For Dr Subhashri Vijayakumar, head of Information and Library at Goethe-Institut Chennai, books have been exactly that. “Books are my gateway to another world from the cosiness of my couch. I think I would have gone experienced the world around me. I have been on the streets of London, war-torn areas of Iran and Iraq. Literally experiencing the world, the happiness, the agony, the sorrow, whatever the book has to offer me,” she says.
The Goethe-Institut Library’s Readathon is a day-long invitation to simply pick up a book and read. The library has experimented with different formats to encourage reading, particularly among children and learners. The Readathon is its latest attempt to bring that idea into a shared space.
Language lessons to leisure reading
The library holds a curated collection, much of it in German, and works with German learners from different backgrounds. Subhashri says reading for pleasure has become harder to sustain among teenagers and adults. “People do read but it is either for academic purposes or for general purposes. Reading for pleasure is absolutely not there nowadays,” she says. She has also noticed shorter attention spans and a growing reliance on Kindle and PDFs.
The library’s work with younger readers offers a different picture. Among children from Classes 3 to 8, Subashri still sees schools encouraging them to pick books, read them and engage with them through activities.
Pages meet people
The Readathon also changes the setting of reading. Participants can bring their own books or choose one from the library shelves. Subhashri sees value in putting readers together, even though reading itself is often solitary. She says,“You get to find a group of people who share your own thoughts and imaginations. You get to easily make conversation and it actually becomes very easy when I know you and I like the same type of a book or the same genre of a book, or we share the same delight for an author.”
A conversation about one book can also lead another reader towards an unfamiliar author or genre. For Subhashri, that exchange is part of the pleasure she wants the event to restore.
The Readathon will take place at the Goethe-Institut Library today from 10 am to 5 pm. Entry is free, and anyone interested can walk in, bring a favourite book or choose one from the shelves.
