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From now until August 6, the 28th issue Lima International Book Fair (FIL) In the park Independent Hero Jesus Maria. A fitting name considering the chosen venue. It will have themes This year’s event is: commemoration of the 200th anniversary of the battle of Junín and Ayacucho, which, as we all know, determined our destiny as an independent nation.
Therefore, over the next three weeks, the exhibition will host more than 800 events and welcome more than 50 international guests, including John Boyne from Ireland and Patricio Pron from Argentina. Andreas Oppenheimerthe Spaniards María Martínez and Inma Rubiales, among others. Likewise, it will host a tribute to the Peruvian poet Rosella di Paulo and will be attended by an important delegation of national writers, including outstanding writers Jaime Bailey, Alonso Cueto, Alfredo Blaise Echenique, Raphael Dummett There are a lot more.
If necessary, this newspaper will also participate in it Foreign Investment Agency With what he already knew “Sunday Coffee” Numerous experts will discuss interesting current topics: from misinformation to political polarization, from the challenges of artificial intelligence to the Paris Olympics.
However, beyond the dialogues and roundtables hosted, the core of such events remains the same: the book. Its mission is to bring these amazing artifacts closer to people, but which have been delayed in our country.
This reflection is not insignificant, since we almost always tend to say that Peruvians do not read, but we rarely ask ourselves what efforts are being made to facilitate the arrival of a book in their hands. On the one hand, according to the 2022 National Reading Survey, 47.3% of literate Peruvians between 18 and 64 years old said that they had read a book (not a newspaper or magazine, but a book) in the last 12 months. Consultation. Data Journalism Department trading (ECData) The report that will be published in the coming days shows that in a study of 102 countries, Peru is actually in the middle of the table that aims to measure the reading of its population (5.35 books per year), having last year reached the highest number of books published and sold in our country since 2020.
Although our statistics are certainly far from those of developed countries (in Spain, for example, twice as many books are read per year as here), people seem to have a certain interest in reading, and perhaps we do not know how to promote this interest. Take bookstores, for example, there are very few of them throughout the country, the vast majority of which are concentrated in the capital. Anyone who has been to regions far from the big cities knows that finding a bookstore in these places can be a task both exhausting and frustrating. The situation is even worse if we talk about libraries open to the public, many of which (the few that exist) are in a miserable situation, with weak funding and even poorer catalogues.
It is for this reason that book fairs are so necessary, as they build a bridge between books and the potential readers our country so desperately needs. In addition, for our children, these events can help them start reading at an early age, expanding the possibilities of their minds to be richer.
In this sense, this year’s FIL is still centered on independence, because after all, books exist to liberate our minds. After all, as I said Mario Vargas Llosawithout them we would be “more conformist, less restless and rebellious.” Or, in the words of another writer, the Frenchman Michel Houellebecq, “Life without reading is dangerous because it forces us to live in conformity.”
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