Deborah Moggach
Here are some facts to get you thinking:
- It is estimated that 4 million adults in the UK choose not to read as a hobby
- Results from a YouGov survey of 2,059 adults showed that 29% of people claimed to not have enough time to read, 26% simply do not enjoy the act of reading a book, and 40% always preferred to do something else with their spare time. The remaining 5% alone classed themselves as book-readers.
‘The Great Gatsby’ by F. Scott Fitzgerald
‘The Great Gatsby’ by F. Scott Fitzgerald has been described as many things over the years – timeless, disappointing, beautifully written, intricate, boring, perfection – this conflicting list goes on.
It’s one that’s been on our reading list for a long time. You know the type – that classic fear of the unknown and therefore potentially direly boring, well, classic. But, when we had a moment (and it is a relatively short moment in the grand reading scheme of things, the book only being 180 pages long) we took a deep breath, pushed our classroom prejudices aside, and had a read.
Happy Chinese New Year!
Sunday saw in the beginning of China’s most important family holiday – the Chinese New Year, or the Spring Festival as it’s also known as. And if you heard a loud cacophony of noise in the night sky that evening, it would have been Chinese people letting off a multitude of fireworks (or a worrisome natural occurrence which we’d like to think is pretty unlikely). The legend goes that many years ago a wise village elder advised the Chinese people to scare away a bloodthirsty monster from their defenceless villages with loud noises and bangs like the ones emitted from fireworks. It worked, and so Chinese people have celebrated like this for hundreds of years.