MPR: The Walker's "reading room" vs. your local library

Pitting Reading Room MPLS against the ‘Local Library’ is missing the point.

The public library is a place primarily about open access to information while Reading Room MPLS is an event primarily about the experience of intentional reading with others. It’s like apples to oranges, there’s no way to compare the two!

More importantly, Reading Room MPLS is a creative project, put together by an artist, Chris Fischbach, who is thinking very intentionally about the experience of reading, and who is posing very interesting questions in doing so. Kurt Vonnegut said that “Literature is the only art form in which the audience performs the score.” Reading Room MPLS provides a platform for a community of readers to test the claim that reading is a creative act in and of itself. Saying “You can do that at the library!” dismisses the role of the artist in this project and discounts yourself from a really juicy conversation going on in the Twin Cities right now: What happens when you draw a frame around the act of reading?

The bookmarks made for Reading Room MPLS suggest that others take the project on the road… so what about Reading Room at the local library? A quite room away from distraction that asks you to consider the act of reading with artful intention. I think that’d be fantastic!