Empathy by Proxy vs Lived Experience

I’m the type of reader, who reaches for a sweater when the protagonist in whatever book I’m reading is cold. I will be startled out of a street corner in Beirut or the journey of a post-apocalyptic robot and his human companion by an interruption and realise I’m actually still seated on my couch elsewhere. And be annoyed. I’m a librarian – I believe firmly in the power of literature to transform people and make them kinder and more empathetic. And yet, it is one thing to read about the lives and tribulations of others and another to experience them.

“That’s the thing about books. They let you travel without moving your feet.” 

Jhumpa Lahiri

That’s one of the reasons that despite the upheaval of moving and living around the world – and moving is one of life’s major stressors – I’ve embraced that life. I can never again look at a news-headline or article about a place I’ve visited let alone lived in, in the same way. I have an understanding, albeit partial, depending on how long I’ve been there and how close I got to the politics and lives of the local people that will never leave me. Which complicates things – for one I can no longer be unilateral about events – call it cultural relativism or whatever you want – but my thoughts are endless shades of grey. And I don’t have enough hands for the “on one hand .. but on the other … and the other” discussions.

One of the things that is coming back to me while I’m kind of on vacation waiting to see what the next weeks and months will bring in the middle east, is that feeling of being in limbo. Then uncertainty and second guessing. I suppose that makes for very boring literature – the endless rumination about “if that then should I do x, y, z and if otherwise then a, b, c” you can see how that would crash any computer never mind the human mind. Speaking of which, as part of the AI course I was doing (highly recommended btw) I did a bit of vibe-coding and made a little app to download book covers to make book posters. And I really recommend Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Service Model if you’re looking for great satire on AI, programming, robotics etc.

Here are a few of the posters I’d created when our G8 students were reading “Nowhere Boy” by Katherine Marsh to encourage them to “read around” the main themes of the book.

We are not refugees, nor are we really displaced. Right now officially we’re all on vacation. But I also see it as helping build my empathy for people who are refugees and displaced and cannot just walk into the local pharmacy and say “I left in a hurry and didn’t take my prescription with me here are my last few tablets, can you refill it on the virtue and credibility of my white face and ability to speak your language.”

Mama Mia – here we go again!

At the moment I’m living proof that stress does weird and bad things to your brain. A little less than 2 weeks ago, my husband and I boarded a flight from Dubai to the beautiful and magnificent AlUla in Saudi Arabia for a long weekend. Two days later the USA started a war with Iran and the UAE got caught in the firing range. And our flights home were cancelled. We rebooked our hotel and the flights were cancelled again, and we rebooked our hotel and the flights were cancelled again … and I got that “it’s just like covid” feeling. (The flight between AlUla and Dubai still hasn’t left).

A few photos from AlUla

Since my husband had meetings in the Netherlands and we could get a flight from Jeddah to Amsterdam, with the schools’ permission – as learning had moved online anyway, off we went. First an 8 hour taxi drive, another hotel and then the flight.

So far so good. Then we landed in Amsterdam to a phone call from our neighbour telling us that they thought we may have a water leak. That was the understatement of the year. Somehow the solar panels / water tanks had sprung a leak and disgorged between 400-800 litres of water from the third to the first floor ruining everything along the way. I won’t post pictures, suffice to say when I told this to my boss and then later sent some pictures she said she’d had no idea just how bad it was and thought I may be exaggerating, and apologized for that. Basically the place was uninhabitable and we sat around in a dripping mess for a few hours while the insurance and people with drying machines could jump into action. One just goes totally numb in those circumstances.

One of my friends, who, as a Ukrainian has been a victim of the war there, now in its fourth year was very empathetic, while alerting me to the following:

The Ukrainian phrase often used when a difficult situation is resolved, or a “debt” is paid in a monetary way, is: “Дякую, Боже, що взяв грошима” (pronounced: Dyakuyu, Bozhe, shcho vzyav hroshyma). It literally means “Thank you, God, that you took [it] in money,” implying the loss was just financial rather than something worse.

I keep reminding myself of that. We have insurance. It will take two months to completely gut and rebuild the house. We have lost furniture including some irreplaceable family heirlooms. But it is stuff. Just stuff. One of my husband’s closest university friends died yesterday after 18 months struggle with a brain tumor. Another of our friends is battling cancer.

Our problems are small potatoes. But it’s still hard to concentrate. Hard to focus on substantial work. I can neither be on holiday – our two week spring break was brought forward by a week, so officially I’m on holiday – nor can I do the work I “need” to do – prepare a presentation for an upcoming library conference, build some Libguides (ironically one on revolution), finalise some book orders, start reading books for my book award jury duty.

Instead I’ve been knitting socks and listening to audiobooks interspersed with some walks. I’m on my fourth and fifth pair since leaving Dubai (I usually knit at least two at a time. It’s mindlessly productive. I can highly recommend Arundhati Roy’s “Mother Mary Comes to Me”.


I want to cry but I can’t. I want to write, but this post has been open for nearly a week.

And so we move towards the end of week two. I didn’t get to hear the rockets and drones being intercepted. I wasn’t a worker who was killed as collateral damage. I’ve witnessed it through our compound and school WhatsApp messages and messages from my friends.

But I’m still feeling unsettled. Covid was one thing. War is something completely different.

#sensemaking Demystifying mystery

At the moment the Mystery genre is getting a lot of love from everyone from middle school to adult and a lot of great books are being released. Since we’re in a middle/high school library I wanted to showcase the mystery books that are not too spicy / intense. In our G8 core library we have “We were liars” and “The Naturals” which is probably at the upper level particularly in the later books in the series.

Along the lines of the work I did a couple of years back on Dystopian Fiction, I started to work on doing the same for sub-genres of Mystery. This time around I didn’t have some flowchart work others had already prepared to riff-off and I wanted to focus particularly on books suitable for middle school. I’ve relied on the excellent sub-genre descriptions of Mark Eleyat (who also has great pages on other genres and subgenres) and tried to make some kind of a flow to it. Somehow so many other things have intervened so it’s taken months to get to this point. I would love some feedback / suggestions for improvement on the flowchart.

And I’ve created these Middle School posters. The Canva Template is available for you to adapt to your situation – one day I hope to be able to expand it for YA and even adult, as I’m personally a big mystery/thriller. If you create anything based on this for YA or adult please feel free to share in a comment.

Nonfiction plus time and emotion

The following slides are part of a presentation Katie Day and I made for the 2025 ISLE librarian conference in London. (Note: Although I am the one “publishing” or “blogging” this discussion the credit equally goes to Katie Day as this all originates in our many discussions on reading, nonfiction, librarianship and more. )

As we prepare for our presentation at the wonderful NEEV Children’s literature Festival in Bangalore I was prompted to put some of the thoughts we had back in March onto this blog.

The slides are pretty self-explanatory. The main idea being that we tend to lump nonfiction into one big pile, perhaps separated by the five types recognised by Melissa Stewart. In this part of the presentation we argued that nonfiction could be categorised along the dimensions of “reality” “time” and “emotion”. In doing so one can more easily appeal to students who are more used to the fictional genres and sub-genres and perhaps find some nonfiction appealing to their fictional reading preferences.

This is the typical way of looking at the continuum between fiction and nonfiction. Note we talk about nonfiction as being “informational” rather than “factual” and try to nudge students into thinking of it in the same way.

The next dimension we add to the equation is that of time. In this instance we are focused on the bottom line of the time dimensions of nonfiction.

We then further elaborate with the dimension of emotion. And this is where we allow our students to feel they are in the more familiar territories of “genre”

The next couple of slides give examples of the 6 “emotional tones” and related books.

Have fun exploring and discussing the categorisations with your students.

塞翁失馬 The Lost Horse

I’ve just finished reading the really well written “The Many Meanings of Meilan” by Andrea Wang. Having spent 16 of the last 20 years in Hong Kong, Singapore and China it was a reminder of so much of my time there and the discoveries of the language, literature, poetry and idiom.

There’s a lot happening in this book, but what I enjoyed most is the idea of naming and meaning and the ambiguity of sound and meaning in the homonyms of the Chinese language. I loved how she wrapped herself in the different meanings of “Lan” depending on the character, so as to adjust herself to the interpretations of herself of others around her, while discovering who she really was and claiming herself.

It also reminded me of the first time I came across the 塞翁失馬 (sai weng shi ma) chengyu – enjoy.

From November 2009

Today a story. Here is the famous story which is commonly interpreted as saying that “every cloud has a silver lining” This is the version from YellowBridge. Certainly in my own life in the long run this parable has proven to be true. But as impulsive as I am emotionally I don’t always recognise it at the time!

“A man who lived on the northern frontier of China was skilled in interpreting events. One day for no reason, his horse ran away to the nomads across the border. Everyone tried to console him, but his father said, “What makes you so sure this isn’t a blessing?” Some months later his horse returned, bringing a splendid nomad stallion. Everyone congratulated him, but his father said, “What makes you so sure this isn’t a disaster?” Their household was richer by a fine horse, which the son loved to ride. One day he fell and broke his hip. Everyone tried to console him, but his father said, “What makes you so sure this isn’t a blessing?”

A year later the nomads came in force across the border, and every able-bodied man took his bow and went into battle. The Chinese frontiersmen lost nine of every ten men. Only because the son was lame did father and son survive to take care of each other. Truly, blessing turns to disaster, and disaster to blessing: the changes have no end, nor can the mystery be fathomed.

塞翁失馬 (sai weng shi ma), the title of this story, is actually a commonly used Chinese idiom or chengyu . It literally translates as “Old Sai loses a horse”. Old Sai is the wise man in the fable. The expression is used to remind others to take life in stride because things aren’t really as good (or bad) as they seem. Certainly seems like a wise advice for a society that lives only for the present.”

Ed Young has written this into a children’s book.  We’ve got some compilations of Chinese stories, but kids somehow like having one story per book and to have that story lavishly illustrated.

Poetry Analysis

I’m busy trying to decide what to do with very old blogposts as I was an avid blogger from 2003 to 2011 before I became a librarian. I literally have 1000s of posts that I’m not sure what to do with, so I’m going to selectively add posts that have to do with literature, language, librarianship, reading etc.

From November 2014

夜梦上嵩山，独携藜杖出。
千岩与万壑，游览皆周毕。
梦中足不病，健似少年日。
既悟神返初，依然旧形质。
始知形神内，形病神无疾。
形神两是幻，梦寤俱非实。
昼行虽蹇涩，夜步颇安逸。
昼夜既平分，其间何得失？

A DREAM OF MOUNTAINEERING
At night, in my dream, I stoutly climbed a mountain,
Going out alone with my staff of holly-wood.
A thousand crags, a hundred hundred valleys–
In my dream-journey none were unexplored
And all the while my feet never grew tired
And my step was as strong as in my young days.
Can it be that when the mind travels backward
The body also returns to its old state?
And can it be, as between body and soul,
That the body may languish, while the soul is still strong?
Soul and body–both are vanities;
Dreaming and waking–both alike unreal.
In the day my feet are palsied and tottering;
In the night my steps go striding over the hills.
As day and night are divided in equal parts– Between the two, I get as much as I  lose.
Bai Juyi (772-846) Tr. Arthur Waley

As my daughter gets older our conversations are becoming more interesting. This evening we were discussing the interpretation and analysis of poetry. She’s been looking at Emily Bronte, Rossetti and Bai Juyi. The latter in translation.  But they used the old Wade-Giles transliteration: Po Chü-i so initially she didn’t associate it as being Chinese, once she’d worked that out, of course she went to the original. And then our discussion was about how when you’re analysing something in translation and thinking of word choice, does one consider the choice of the translator or of the original. Naturally in an English class that is filled with English mono-linguals at Grade 7 level, the answer is yes, but how does that work out in a multi-lingual / cultural class where at least some of the students would be able to read the poem in the original?
I was telling her how so many of the poets used homonyms to convey a hidden meaning in their poetry and prose, for example if they were criticising the emperor or local war lord or officials, and then one would have to know what stood for what.  And in fact, if one reads the introduction and background here, it gives some very interesting context.

Aqua should not be the colour of death

I’ve been meaning to write this for a while. A friend died in February. She was not just a neighbour but someone who had been a part of our lives ever since we started coming here. Being back for the summer means that her absence is a constant presence. We have been fortunate in our lives to not lose many people on a permanent basis along the way. Living abroad has meant the constant temporary loss of person and place, sometimes our selves. For my children the first big loss was that of our wonderful golden lab. After she passed we could not bear to be in the kitchen without involuntarily anticipating tripping over her as we cut vegetables and she was there particularly for the broccoli scraps. The habit of her presence only began to cease when we moved house and the substance of her being was not in the next place.

Similarly the process of empty nesting with first the one child, coincided with us moving country at the same time she did. So there wasn’t a her-shaped space in our new country, even as we created a guest room which wasn’t so much a guest room as a room for her when she could visit. Which covid quickly slashed the delusions of. With the next child to fly, a combination of yet another home and the continuation of covid, life was this weird limbo of presence and absence, being and not being. There was not so much specific as generalised absence and grief for everyone and everything that was familiar and real.

I wanted to combine this with some picture and middle grade books on death and dying and grief. Which of course means a few days delay while I research and search and put a poster together. Publishers have very homogenous and defined ideas of covers and what displays the essence of a book. Unfortunately for death this seems to converge on a blueish aqua. Culturally traditional colours such as black, grey or white are apparently not seen as right for the K-14 crowd.

DESIGN: AlwaysWithHonor.com and David McCandless.  RESEARCH: David McCandless, Pearl Doughty-White, Alexia Wdowski

“The Colour of Death” led me to this interesting graphic by David McCandless (see video below). Which makes me wonder where the dominant colour for the books come from.

Whatever colour death is, it is not anything in pastel hues. If anything it is the absence of colour, of everything. A vacuum. Which brings me to one of the best books on grief and the grieving process – which didn’t come up in my initial search with the keywords of “death” and “grief” – the extremely clever – visually and verbally – “Bug in a Vacuum” by Mélanie Watt.

I’m sitting on my balcony as the light and shade shifts after the rainstorms we’ve had in the last few days watching the clouds gather and separate and the shadows on the lake and in the lake. Where depth is darker and shallow is lighter. The depth of grief can never be lighter, and definitely not a light acqua.

Relationships are part of both mental and physical memory. And part of the grieving process is retraining my impulses to pop downstairs with some food, or to say hi or to see if she needs anything when I go down to do the groceries. To sit and hear memories of her life in Canada, the Congo and Australia and Switzerland. The unspoken lessons of growing older and less mobile and more removed from tactile life. With life experienced second and third hand through media and text. The lessons of the absence of choice in when to let go and the technicalities of a life lived and a life living well. The horror of the creep of the wish to die becoming stronger than the will to live.

And as we in turn age, these questions become less abstract and more real. When to cling on and when to let go, and who decides.

Core Collection & teacher champions

Last year I wrote about my initiative with our core collection and engaging our middle school teachers in “adopting” a book and helping to promote it. During the analytics for our annual report and to justify repeating the exercise in one of our last staff meetings this year, I put together some stats on the results.

Core Collection Summary

Given the dire state of the nation on reading overall for middle school with each grade reading less than in previous years, this is one small light at the end of the tunnel for me – showing that perhaps we need to narrow rather than continue to broaden our collection and focus on many copies of the most popular books?

Another amazing side effect has been the number of our faculty who are now fans of middle school / young adult literature and who have kept on coming back to finish series (I think it’s really important to have book 1 of as many enticing series as possible in the list). It really matters when not only the ELA teacher but also the PHE/Sports coaches and Drama and Science teachers are reading and recommending books.

Another interesting aspect has been that it seems we’ve arrived at a sort of tipping point of students accessing eBooks and AudioBooks in greater numbers than I’ve previously seen. Since we tend to only buy 3 or 4 of each of the core books (plus whatever ELA has a budget for to put in their class libraries) the most popular books tend to be out all the time, resulting in students then using the digital equivalent. I like AudioBooks as it means I can listen (often at 1.5-2x speed) and do my knitting, and I often have to persuade students that listening to audiobooks is also reading. In a culture where very few students are read to, I think it’s also important for them to hear stories – not the least to avoid embarrassing incidents with the pronunciation of words and names!

Of course I know that borrowing doesn’t always translate to reading (see the amazing way the great Nathan Pyle illustrates this below), but on the other hand I’m also comforted by the fact that our ELA classroom libraries have also stocked up on many of the core books and their circulations are not counted in my stats.

Image by Nathan W Pyle – buy his amazing books!

One of the runaway success books I’d like to highlight is “The Academy” by TZ Layton. In common I think with most 10-14 year olds, most of the young soccer players at our school are convinced it’s only a matter of time before they’re scouted into one of the youth leagues and this series feeds their dreams.

Actions & Activities

The actions and activities around the core books this year include:

  • Culling of the least popular (and some of the most popular*) books from the previous year
  • Book overviews on the middle school TV displays
  • Core list on Advisory Slides
  • “Core Wall” in library
  • ELA & MS teacher promotion
  • House points for book reviews
  • On libguide / recommended to parents during parent conferences
  • Weekly Kahoot quiz January – May (inter-house competition)
  • Battle of the Core live quiz assembly – 8 May (moved from January to increase exposure)

* while some of the books were taken out because they just didn’t fly for one reason or another (usually because I’d been misled by a good review without having been able to read the book first, or I misjudged the audience), some have been given wings and are flying on their own without the need to be on a list, or have been adopted by the ELA department as one of their book club books. Of course there is always great irony in choices. After not being able to successfully sell “The thing about jellyfish” by Ali Benjamin all year long, I took it off the list for next year and of COURSE then some young booktokker started recommending it and now everyone wants to read it!

Another side effect has been more faculty coming to me for recommendations for their own reading of for books for their younger kids or nieces / nephews – there is nothing more flattering, no greater gift you can give a librarian than ask for recommendations!

there is nothing more flattering, no greater gift you can give a librarian than ask for recommendations!

In conclusion I’d say if you’re in any doubt about the value of having a core collection, go ahead and try it out. It doesn’t have to be 25 books but it does help to have at least one representative of each genre. Including the first book in a series is always a good idea and I also try to have books that are fairly recent, include books from visiting authors if we have any and to try and tap into the zeitgeist.

School Year end 2025

We’ve been on summer break for just over a week now and I’m feeling sufficiently rested to sit down and write again.

Book returns

The end of the school year is always a busy time for librarians with the dual task of getting overdue books back and making sure that students have enough of the right books in their hands to entice them to do some reading over the summer. It really is a dichotomy – the students who most need to read more are the ones who have the hardest time keeping track of books – probably because they just borrow because they’re being told to do so and then promptly put the books somewhere never to be found again. And then of course when they become overdue it’s a fuss and bother and they are even less inclined to borrow.

Inventory

The big tasks include doing inventory – something we’ve turned more into a continual process so by the end of the year it’s more just following up on missing items – often they return – from students (or more often returned by nannies or parents) who consider going past the circulation desk as being optional. Unfortunately being in the middle east certain types of books also just disappear depending on the heat of current rhetoric – or in the case of this year actual bombing going on.

Core Collection

With our ELA (English Language Arts) department I’ve been very busy creating our new “Core Library Books” for the coming year (Grade 6; Grade 7; Grade 8)

And, continuing the tradition started last year, promoting them first with our middle school faculty. I’ll do a separate blog on the result of the core collection this year.

Summer reading

This also feeds into our Summer Reading Libguide which we try to promote as much as possible with students and parents. A few of the ELA classes had their students explore the guide and the various reading lists in detail and then make their own reading goals based on the lists and then email their parents with their reading plans and either borrow the books or request parents purchased them for the summer. I was also on hand with Sora Marketplace open to purchase the eBook or Audiobook for the students who wanted a digital copy. Our summer reading borrowing guideline is “as many books as you need and know you can take care of and return after the break“

Annual Report

The most arduous task at the end of the year, and one which it seems many international school librarians have more or less given up on, is creating the annual report. I can see why people stop doing this. With declining borrowing / reading it can be quite a depressing exercise. It’s also remarkably difficult to get good data our of our systems. Follett Destiny is a dreadful platform to get good data from – in contrast with other systems. I was reading Rutger Bregman’s “Moral Ambition” (see video below) around the same time, and came across the concept of vanity metrics – basically just putting together data that makes you look good. With that at the back of my mind, putting the report together (Annual Report 2024-25) became this exercise in trying to show both that the situation with reading is not great while trying to show that as librarians and teachers we’re doing our darnest to turn the tide and hopefully all is not lost. And even when we lose in reading perhaps we’re making inroads in research. Much as I hated studying business / accounting and was glad to escape being financial person it did put me in good stead for being able to work with data.

I’m planning on doing a bit more blogging this break, so keep coming back! Comment on any topics you’d like to see covered.

When words are too much

I’ve been meaning to do these posters forever (canva link) and not had the time. One of the things I like to have in our core collection is at least one picture book per grade. This week I’ve had all our G7 classes coming in to have a look at the books again as we move towards our Battle of the Core assembly and have our weekly quiz kahoots on the 75 books.

I was showing the group Mel Tregonning’s “Small Things” and one student latched onto it and was really interested in the concept of a wordless or silent picture book. He read it and then went on to this week’s display of wordless books and read a couple more.

Wordless or silent books are an amazing resource to have in your collection. You can read more about IBBY’s Silent Book project. They provide excellent prompts for creative writing, for quiet contemplation and for vocabulary and sentence structure development for language learners.

The posters are of a few in our collection but there are many more to explore.