Page 43 - Bulletin, Vol.81 No.1, May 2022

THE GREAT RETURN OF BOOKS

During this 'phoney' period, which was not more phoney than the “phoney war”, it was
necessary to reinvent oneself to fill the void left by the absence of social and cultural
activities.

There was television, but the public stations were unable to make the most of this
period to offer reruns of good cultural programmes or concerts.

So, personally I dipped into my stock of "To be read one day !!!!" books and found some
treasures. It was not possible to buy new ones, as culture was not considered essential.
See the previous paragraph for evidence of this.

This period also allowed me to question my choices for leisure and my priorities. It was
a long time to be on probation, with plenty of time to think about things, and even to get
depressed.

What do books mean to me? A source of information, a moment of relaxation, a return
to good French (sorry I read more often in French than in English). I'm resisting all these
new words that have blossomed during the pandemic and which, moreover, have been
invited into the new versions of dictionaries. In fact, the language has evolved more in
two years than in the last thirty. The members of the French Academy have even
managed to give a gender to COVID.

This led me to talk about it with some of my friends who are avid readers. For them, of
course, we don't even question the fact that reading is a bit like breathing, we do it
without thinking about it. But why don't we all read? Because of a lack of time, laziness
or simply because we have not been initiated to it.

Once again we come back to the essential, education that determines our future. And
this is how we realise how lucky we were to live in countries that gave us the
opportunity to acquire the basics. The garden was ready, it was up to us to cultivate it.

But let's go back to the books: you can read them as soon as they appear, usually
printed on good paper, presented with a beautiful cover, with the feeling of being an
insider, you can wait for them to come out in "paperback" format, and then you can
acknowledge this wonderful progress in allowing the less well-off to access reading,
subscribe to the village library and let others choose for you, download them to make
them accessible everywhere and diversify the possibilities, and even choose to access
them in audio format, which allows the visually impaired to retain the pleasure of
"reading".

But we still don't know why we choose this or that book. For years my choices were
guided by a certain Bernard Pivot on French television who put us in touch with writers.
Fortunately, there are still some literary programmes today, but unfortunately not on
prime-time channels. Sometimes I simply wander around the shelves of cultural
supermarkets, yes these exist too, and it is often the cover that catches my eye. By
reading the summary on the back cover, I decide on whether to read it ... or not.

AAFI-AFICS BULLETIN, Vol. 81 No.1, 2022-05 41