The ritual was nice, appropriate to the profile of the event. After far too many years of legal, legislative and judicial tapestry, the sports hall – built during socialism, and then in the post-war transition, despite all rules and procedures, left for the use and personal exploitation of a party-friendly figure – was returned to the city, renovated and put into multifunctional public use.
This is also part of the policy characteristic of the current Zagreb government, to democratize and decentralize culture from a social base in the closest living environment, neighborhood and quarter, which we can only warmly welcome.
On this occasion, plaques and certificates of appreciation were awarded to deserving individuals, both institutions such as a successful neighborhood football club and a cult venue for Zagreb's alternative culture located on the edge of the neighborhood. Among them was a boy, who is only in his final years of elementary school, and who earned the plaque as the biggest reader in the local neighborhood library.
The boy had the most book loans from that library last year. Such a practice is not unknown, the media occasionally treat us to stories and features about "unusual" children of today whose uniqueness is reflected in the fact that, you won't believe it, they still read books.
In an era that is, among other things, strongly marked by digital culture, the omnipresence of so-called smart technologies in our lives, and the permanent distraction of constant microcommunications that they encourage us to engage in, there are such miracles as children who continue to read books, despite and in spite of it.
Such protagonists, in narratives formatted in this way, take on the characteristics of an endemic, rare species that needs to be specially singled out and praised. In addition to the little reader, such contributions feature their teachers, parents, friends, neighbors... all of whom utter superlatives about the little heroine or hero.
Like the public-media gaze at a miracle, the curious gaze of the audience in some kind of perverted circus that also includes a cage with a child, who often wears glasses. He/she sits in silence and devotedly performs the archaic practice of reading a book. Books, contrary to some hasty predictions at the dawn of the digital age a few decades ago, have not disappeared, and they will not disappear.
Indeed, we witness how they are lucrative commodities among other commodities, have found their place in modern industries and markets, are printed and offered mercilessly, and book fairs and festivals are in full bloom.
What has certainly changed, and hence the aforementioned social media tendency to exoticize our youngest readers, are the practices and experiences related to reading. The possibilities and opportunities for classical hermeneutics have been significantly reduced, and at the same time we are exposed to reading practices more than ever before in history. So, do we know what and how we read?
Bonus video:
