What important period is it now?... I don’t really want to talk about it because it’s actually one of the worst time of each year, but it’s my final exams week! To get into the spirit of this tiring week, one of the things that are mostly associated with this week is probably books. It is time to read, read, and read. And that is the reason, why I chose this picture, a picture of the Thailand’s International Book Fair that had been with us for so long. Many of us may believe that Thai people is one of the countries that holds a small percentage for the number of citizens who read books. However, this picture signifies contrasting ideas because as you have seen from the picture there are numerous people from all ages, all gender, and all walks of life who went to this fair. In fact, with the support from Thai Health Promotion Foundation (สสส.), it was evident that Thai people had engaged towards a positive trend in reading from 61.2% in 2003 to 69.1% in 2005 which is really an outstanding achievement. So with more book fairs that have been set up more often each year and an increase in percentage of people reading, I believe Thai culture is moving towards the book/educational culture. We can also see this Thai people love for book culture through the growth of the café/coffee shops/ chic libraries like TCDC and TK parks where many of our teens will spend their days reading there. Therefore, with an encouragement from the states and schools, Thai culture will really become a true books culture soon. This love of book will make help our nation grow and constructed ourselves to move its role from a developing country to develop country in our near future.
Statistic source:
http://www.thaihealth.or.th/healthcontent/special_report/23614
