Orange Birmingham Book Festival 2005 - Reading Shots
Sign up for updates
Enter your email address below to receive regular email updates.
Orange Birmingham Book Festival 2005 - Reading Shots
7 - 14 October 2005
Reading Shots is a project to bring the excitement and pleasure of debate and discussion about books and reading into the coffee shops of city-centre Birmingham. It will encourage a sharing of ideas and responses to reading as an arts activity and create a series of activities in spaces that are not normally considered to be arts venues.
The provision of coffee shops in Birmingham has grown enormously over the last ten years and increasingly they are becoming the third space, neither home nor work but an environment in which individuals can find time to relax, think, consider and even argue. In the eighteenth century coffee houses were arenas for new ideas and intellectual debate and this role is being re-discovered by a contemporary generation of coffee drinkers. Reading Shots will provide fresh stimulus for this expresso generation.
The recent publication of the Daniels & Daniels independent Coffee Culture guide to Birmingham’s coffee shops and visual art space highlighted a natural synergy between using these third spaces and arts and culture. The use of coffee shops for literature events (Coffeehouse Challenges in the Orange Studio and Starbucks, Book Crossing events in Hudson’s) has demonstrated the appropriateness of these venues. Reading Shots will provide arts activities to occupy these third spaces.
Along with the growth in coffee-culture has come a growth in readers groups and book groups and an interest in sharing an enthusiasm for books and reading as a valuable addition to the reading experience. Public libraries have promoted readers groups heavily and there is a growing non-aligned network of book groups meeting independently across Birmingham. Reading-culture is now higher profile than ever before. Reading Shots will support the growth of new audiences for reading activities.
