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Morgantown High’s LiTEArary Society: Writing the book on words, ideas and reading

So, how do you cross a book desert?

One page at a time.

Well, check that, Rania Zuri said.

First, you have to get a book into the hands of a potential reader – so all that page-turning can commence to turn such deserts into fertile ground for ideas, discourse and just-plain good stories.

And that’s something the Morgantown High School senior has made into a mission over the past year.

Rania is the founder of the LiTEArary Society, a book club for the bookish, at her school.

Every few days, members get together to sip hot tea (hence the wordplay in the name) while doing serious reading.

How serious?

English major reading, serious.

English major-graduate seminar reading, serious.

Forget pre-movie, Harry Potter or all those teen-angst travails, a la John Green.

Try Jane Austin, instead.

Voltaire and Dostoevsky, too.

How about “The Necklace,” by Guy de Maupassant while you’re at it?

That’s the 1884 short story about wants-versus-needs, and counting your blessings – even if you don’t know (not yet) that they are that.

Don’t get caught up in the fact that the above tale is 140 years old, Rania said.

Not with Thanksgiving and Black Friday now in the books, with tons of holiday shopping to go.

“The references and some syntax might change,” she said, “but the truths are universal.”

New narratives

The tale, though, as said, doesn’t end there.

As said, the society over the past year has been especially busy – Rania, in particular.

There was her appearance on the Today show, and her write-up in Forbes magazine and her TEDx talk, too.

And all those motor car excursions up and down West Virginia’s country roads, with all those books bouncing up and down on the backseat.

Her home state is part of the aforementioned book desert.

So are other places on the globe where words on a page, electronic or otherwise, just aren’t available.

In the U.S., the LiTEArary Society, which is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, is thinking specifically about children, ages 3-6, who are in Head Start programs.

Head Start is the federally funded social enrichment program launched in 1964 as part of President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty. Oftentimes, life gets in the way of that war, however.

Oftentimes, the moms, dads and caregivers in such households don’t read aloud or go to libraries because they’re too busy simply trying to get by.

Thus, the book desert, which makes for young minds – becoming intellectually barren.

“If you can read, you can learn,” Rania said. “Reading inspires critical thinking. You learn about people. You learn about the world.”

And, you learn what all 55 counties in the Mountain State actually look like – inside and on the ground – for people trying to advance literacy here.

Rania traveled to each one to personally meet with each county Head Start director.

There were 55 of them, yet in many of the Head Start households she visited, there wasn’t one book to be found, on a shelf or anywhere else.

You can help change that, she said, by visiting Barnes & Noble in University Town Centre for the society’s weekly drive. The bookseller “adopted” the LiTEArary Society – “To our great appreciation,” Rania said.

The next chapter …

Along the way, the purveyor of books became an author, as well.

Rania is the author and illustrator of “It’s Mountain Music to My Ears!”

Her book follows the adventures of Billy Bob, an Appalachian hare, in his exploration of the sonic properties of West Virginia’s hills and hollows – where old-time dulcimers, fiddles and claw-hammer banjos still ring out in the 21st century.

Other titles are being planned, Rania said, with 100% of all proceeds donated to the society’s One Book at a Time initiative.

“We didn’t think we’d have this much success,” Rania said of the society that has also donated books across rural India and to an orphanage in Jerusalem.

Still, she said, it’s easy when you break it down to those aforementioned increments, she told The Dominion Post previously.

“We have a tagline: ‘Inspiring Future Bibliophiles, One Book at a Time.’ That’s us.”

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