The most recent incorporation to Ascend’s growing library is the Book Cottage initiative by DP1 students Meera and Xai. In their own words:
What was the motivation behind starting the Book Cottage?
It started off with the realization that we both collectively had a lot of books we had no need to keep, and we would often attempt to give them away to other people but it was never as widespread as a school, to be honest. I especially really wanted to build something so I saw these book cottages or “little libraries” and it sparked me to create my own. We realised it would help the community discover new books or even inspire other kids to read books. The whole concept of a “little library” just felt so perfect to us when we were thinking of ways to reduce the amount of books we were storing, without feeling like we were throwing away the books, and instead we got to grant them a second chance with someone who could enjoy them from a new perspective.
How does the system work, are there any nuances that students should be aware of?
It’s basically a take a book, leave a book. Students can also just give the books they want to if they wish to, and if the interior of the book cottage is full, it’s placed on a table to keep books out there. It would be better if the books donated weren’t damaged, maybe. If you want to just take a book, I guess that’s okay too since I hope maybe there might be a surplus of books at some point in time. Also, please for most people; the books given are meant to be taken. They don’t have to be returned to the cottage unless the student wants to return it.
What do you hope that the Book Cottage will accomplish?
Honestly I think that the hope is primarily to encourage everyone to ascend to build a community of readers. We have an amazing library with a lot of books but nowadays you hardly see anyone go and browse for books. By creating the book exchange, we thought it would be a good way to encourage people to not only find new books that they never thought to read, but also share books with others that they enjoyed. This way, you know that when you take a book from the book exchange, someone has read that book and formed their own views about it, and it kinda feels like the book has been pre-loved, in a way that makes it comfortable and like a shared experience. Through this, we were hoping that the Ascend reader community could expand and it could allow for people to share a small view into their taste in reading, and then build a closer knit community of readers.