Whatcha Reading?

Do you read books? I’d love to hear about what you’re reading and how many books you read each year: please write in and tell me. April 23 is the UN’s World Book Day so it’s a good time to take an hour or so away from our cellphones and screens and unwind by turning some pages.

Empirical research shows that very few of us do read these days. Is it because we find out everything we want on YouTube and our smartphones? Or is it that life is just too busy to sit quietly under a tree with a book or a Kindle?

Most of us like reading about places we know and understand. If this sounds like you, try checking out the Weaver Press book list: bags of great, local stories there. Formed in 1998, Weaver is a dynamnic, independent publishing house that produces books from and about Zimbabwe: written about people like us by people like us.

Such as David Coltart’s The Struggle Continues: 50 years of tyranny in Zimbabwe. The first print run sold out in weeks, it’s Exclusive Books’ top seller at O. R. Tambo—and it’s available from Weaver Press.

No, I haven’t read it yet but plan to put that right on Independence Day and then I’ll let you know what I think of it. In the meantime, Bhekimpilo Sibanda, writing in NewsDay, describes it as “an incisive, truthful and empathic book.”

Um… April 23 is also World Copyright Day. We break the law when we lift chunks of stuff out of a book or off the Internet and pass it off as our own. Let’s be original and enrich, rather than impoverish our world.