To be clear, I was not at the Frankfurt Book Fair. But in the past few months, I’ve been holding a book fair of sorts on my own after coming to terms with my being a polygamous reader. I seem to think that just because I am unable to read one book at a time,...
Tag: reading
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Books at the fair: reading as resistance
Time has become a privilege one carves out from these days of want and fear: time to muse, to make sense of what’s going on, to read. Reading is crucial: an act of will, of resistance. Slogging through the tremendous crowd on the last day of the Manila Book Fair last September, one gaped at...
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Is it true that 90% of Filipino 10-year-olds can’t read?
In 2019, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (Unesco) and the World Bank introduced the notion of a “learning poverty rate,” or the share of children who cannot read or comprehend a simple text at the age of 10. Figures that emerged before the coronavirus pandemic indicated that the average learning poverty rate...