because my finger is on the literary pulse of the world.....

Fresh from my experience at the 2010 mobilemeet I bring you, my friends, the latest in current thinking, the very razor edge of the sharpest minds, the zenith of current research etc.
It may surprise you to know, if you have the odd book around at home, that you possess a therapeutic tool. Yes it's true! We had a speaker at the mobilemeet who told us so. Reading is a therapeutic activity!.
OK, I'm being unfair, we all know reading is therapeutic, many of us have experienced first hand the beneficial effects of literature.
What the speaker had very successfully done was to adopt and present a buzzword there-by taking a common sense, obvious fact and making it 'professional', 'sellable' and 'hip'. We don't say to someone 'sit down for 30 minutes a day and read and reflect we say 'I suggest you begin bibliotherapy as it may help with the issues you are experiencing'
The exciting and ground breaking things you should know
* People can recognise characters and situations in literature which are similar to their own and can use the fiction to see ways of dealing with issues
*reading helps the reader to experience emotions from a viewpoint other than their own
*reading about a situation can allow the reader to postulate on possible outcomes and use this model in their own situation.
*reading can help to positively modify mood.

The speaker told us, without any false modesty, that her initiative had made a massive, international splash so there is a lesson there. The thing is that the lesson is that we really should communicate better because 10 miles away a number of psychiatric workers had been advocating the same therapy for quite a while when she made her discovery.

so, there you go

Geek alert ;)

Tomorrow I will be attending the 2010 mobilemeet. Yep, it's the annual get together for mobile libraries where we get to look at each other's vans, discuss mobile stuff and generally enthuse about mobile libraries and their place in society. I've never been before but I'm taking Leeds Libraries' brand new van which will be one day old! I'm rather hoping that there will be a nice van from another area there and that we can get them together and have lots of little mobile libraries very soon.
There are even prizes for the best van's, fleets etc.
I might even take photographs