A besieged library showed the power of books

 Are you old enough to have been influenced by Stephen Covey’s The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People? It was big in the ‘90s. If so, you have something in common with a beleaguered band of young Syrians, the subject of an extraordinary recent book. They were residents of Daraya, a small town on the outskirts of Damascus, brought to ruin after battles with, and bombardment by, the regime of Bashar al-Assad. And Covey’s self-help book became one of the most popular volumes in the library they salvaged from the devastated town, lovingly created and maintained in the basement of a wrecked building.

The story is told by French-Iranian journalist Delphine Minoui, who I first heard interviewed on Sean Moncrieff’s programme on Irish radio. She wrote The Book Collectors of Daraya to tell this inspiring story, after many surely difficult Zoom sessions and WhatsApp messages with the librarians of Daraya. I won’t go into the story in too much detail here – that’s Minoui’s book – but it’s truly empowering for two reasons. Firstly, that these young men stayed in their town when most people fled, to either fight the regime or record what was happening, under the appalling conditions of the Syrian civil war. And second, that reading the books they saved from ruined houses became such a vital and sustaining part of their lives. Minoui reports that most of the men – aged mostly in their early twenties – admitted they had not been keen readers before the war, but preserving the books gave them a sense of purpose and identity, then the reading itself gave pleasure, encouragement, escape. These are just some of the reasons why I equate reading with breathing. And I mean reading books, not blogs or Big Reads on the internet. A lot of excellent writing and information is on digital platforms, but to immerse yourself in another world, another mind, a mood- and mind-altering experience, there’s nothing like a book.

Trade figures show that a lot of people discovered or rediscovered the pleasures of reading during our lockdowns, and it’s to be hoped that will be a permanent feature of many lives. In an increasingly visual age, the imagination needed to give the characters and situations on the page three dimensions lights up parts of the brain that must never go dark.

In her wonderful book (also wonderful because it is short, fewer than 200 pages, so you can absorb it and then get on to other books), Minoui mentions this quote from Franz Kafka: “A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”

Break the ice.

The Book Collectors of Daraya is published by Picador