Thank you, as always, to Eleanor, who has put up multiple posts about her recent library reading. My thanks also go to Skai for participating again. Marcie has been taking part in the Toronto Public Library reading challenge Bingo card. I enjoyed seeing in Molly Wizenberg’s latest Substack that she and her child are both doing the Seattle Public Library Summer Book Bingo. I’ve never joined my library system’s adult summer reading challenge because surely it’s meant for non-regular readers. You can sign up to win a prize if you read five or more books – awwww! – and it just wouldn’t seem fair for me to participate.
It’s Pride Month and my library has displays up for it, of course. I got to attend the first annual Queer Folk Festival in London as an ally earlier this month and it was great fun!
Two current initiatives in my library system are pop-up libraries in outlying villages, and a quiet first hour of opening each weekday, meant to benefit those with sensory needs. I volunteer in the first two hours on Tuesdays but haven’t yet noticed lower lighting or it being any quieter than usual.
At the Society of Authors Awards ceremony, Joseph Coelho mentioned that during his time as Waterstones Children’s Laureate, he joined 217 libraries around the country to support their work! (He also built a bicycle out of bamboo and rode it around the south coast.)
I enjoyed this satirical article on The Rumpus about ridding libraries of diversity and inclusion practices. My favourite line: “The ‘Diverse Discussions’ book club will be renamed ‘Not Woke Folk (Tales).’”
And finally, I discovered evidence of my first bout of library volunteering (in Bowie, Maryland, for a middle school requirement) in my mother’s journal entry from 20 April 1996: “Rebecca started her Community Service this a.m., 10 – 12 noon, at the Library. She learned to put children’s books on the cart by sorting them.”
My library use over the last month:
(links are to books not already reviewed on the blog)
READ
- Good Girl by Aria Aber
- Moving the Millers’ Minnie Moore Mine Mansion by Dave Eggers
- Self-Portrait with Family by Amaan Hyder
- May Day by Jackie Kay
- Spring: The Story of a Season by Michael Morpurgo
- The Age of Diagnosis: Sickness, Health and Why Medicine Has Gone Too Far by Suzanne O’Sullivan
SKIMMED
- Period Power: Harness Your Hormones and Get Your Cycle Working for You by Maisie Hill
- Is a River Alive? by Robert Macfarlane
CURRENTLY READING
- Don’t Forget We’re Here Forever: A New Generation’s Search for Religion by Lamorna Ash
- The Honesty Box by Lucy Brazier
- Bellies by Nicola Dinan
- To the Edge of the Sea: Schooldays of a Crofter’s Child by Christina Hall
- The Secret Lives of Booksellers and Librarians: True Stories of the Magic of Reading by James Patterson & Matt Eversmann
- Ripeness by Sarah Moss
CHECKED OUT, TO BE READ
- Fulfillment by Lee Cole
- Adam by Gboyega Odubanjo
- The Forgotten Sense: The Nose and the Perception of Smell by Jonas Olofsson
- Enchanted Ground: Growing Roots in a Broken World by Steven Lovatt
- Boiled Owls by Azad Ashim Sharma
- The Artist by Lucy Steeds
+ various Berlin and Germany guides to plan a September trip
ON HOLD, TO BE COLLECTED
- The Most by Jessica Anthony
- Atmosphere by Taylor Jenkins Reid
- Three Weeks in July by Adam Wishart & James Nally
IN THE RESERVATION QUEUE
- Terrible Horses by Raymond Antrobus
- The Interpretation of Cats: And Their Owners by Claude Béata; translated by David Watson
- The Boy, the Troll and the Chalk by Anne Booth (whom I met at the SoA Awards ceremony)
- The Husbands by Holly Gramazio
- Albion by Anna Hope
- Fragile Minds by Bella Jackson
- The Homemade God by Rachel Joyce
- The Names by Florence Knapp
- Shattered by Hanif Kureishi
- Wife by Charlotte Mendelson
- The Eights by Joanna Miller
RETURNED UNFINISHED
- Normally Weird and Weirdly Normal: My Adventures in Neurodiversity by Robin Ince – His rambling stories work better in person (I really enjoyed seeing him in Hungerford on the tour promoting this book) than in print. I read about 66 pages.
- The Persians by Sanam Mahloudji – I only read the first few pages of this Women’s Prize shortlistee and it seemed flippant and unnecessary.
RETURNED UNREAD
- Day by Michael Cunningham – I’ll get it back out another time.
- Looking After: A Portrait of My Autistic Brother by Caroline Elton – This was requested off of me; I might get it back out another time.
- Rebel Bodies: A Guide to the Gender Health Gap Revolution by Sarah Graham – I lost interest and needed to make space on my card.
- The Kingdoms by Natasha Pulley – I thought I’d try this because it has an Outer Hebrides setting, but I couldn’t get into the first few pages and didn’t want to pack a chunky paperback that might not work out for me.
- Horse by Rushika Wick – I needed to make space on my card plus this didn’t really look like my sort of poetry.
What have you been reading or reviewing from the library recently?
Share a link to your own post in the comments. Feel free to use the above image. The hashtag is #LoveYourLibrary.
Bookish Beck = Rebecca Foster. American transplant to England. Freelance proofreader and book reviewer.
Bookish Beck 
Oooh, I hope you like The Artist. It was an early read for me this year, and it’ll be one of my Books of the Year for sure.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Alas, it was requested off of me before I could read it, but I’ve put myself back in the queue.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Happens to me all the time!
LikeLike
The Kingdoms is easily Natasha Pulley’s weakest, IMO. I did get through it but I struggled. I hope you enjoy Bellies!
I appreciated your thoughtful review of the O’Sullivan, which I agree is not her strongest book. I do think she has important things to say about the power of a diagnosis, for both good and bad. The chapter on Huntingdon’s was provocative for me in a very good way, as I had only ever automatically assumed that you would want to know if you were going to develop Huntingdon’s. I’ve always seen the diagnosis presented in fiction as a way for characters to move forward with their lives, whether they test positive or negative. I now appreciate more that advance knowledge is not necessarily a positive thing and it depends on the individual.
The material on autism/ADHD is so difficult to discuss. I personally resonated with it as a child who would almost definitely have been diagnosed as autistic if I had gone to school nowadays, but as someone who does not embrace the diagnosis as an adult and doesn’t feel it’s really appropriate for me, I totally get what she was saying about it potentially setting artificial limitations. As a child, I think it might have been helpful for me to be labelled autistic as I found it hard to understand why I couldn’t manage my emotions like other children, and ended up constantly feeling bad/wrong. But as an adult, I worry it would make me feel like I am just stuck the way I am. As you say, I don’t think O’Sullivan always gets it right, but it would be good if society could have a respectful discussion about these issues rather than the knee-jerk responses I’ve seen in the media.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I did wonder from your comment on my McKitterick Prize post if you would consider yourself neurodivergent. I have a few friends who are either actively seeking a diagnosis or casually call themselves neurodivergent and I have to say I’m skeptical: either they don’t match up to what I have read about the specific condition, or I think their symptoms are too vague and could be explained by so many other things. (I probably shouldn’t spread this around, but one of my fellow judges did say of Newlands, “but he can’t be autistic, his novel was so empathetic!” and I did an inward cringe but just replied mildly with something about autism being a real spectrum and him clearly being high functioning. But then again, I was surprised when my sister said she thinks my 11yo nephew is on the spectrum, because I’ve always found him very affectionate — it was wrong of me to assume that autism would cancel out such emotions. It took her pointing out specific behaviours for me to notice how she understood him as ‘different’, but I don’t think they will seek a diagnosis.)
When I was first reading the O’Sullivan, a friend saw me with the book and said he thought it was brilliant, which took me aback because he seems like just the sort of person O’Sullivan would be concerned about: ME, CFS, and autism diagnoses, not to mention trans. I guess it’s good that he was open-minded enough to find so much to admire, and didn’t feel got at.
LikeLiked by 1 person
That’s great news about the pop-up village libraries. Thanks for the tip about The Persians. It was on my tbr list but I wasn’t entirely convinced it would be for me.
LikeLiked by 2 people
A strange and somewhat lackluster WP shortlist this year, I thought.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I agree. I’m an ardent Strout fan but I didn’t expect her to be shortlisted.
LikeLike
Hello Beck, I shared my reads for June on my blog. This took longer than I expected to put together. I hope everyone is having a good summer.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Thanks for joining in again!
LikeLike
Needing to make space on one’s card is something I can readily relate to, but I bet it makes most library “users” squint a little. heheh It’s certainly not a concept with which I was familiar at earlier stages of life when I was using the library often but not yet obsessively. hee hee
That’s so cool, that little snippet from your mother’s journals. How nice. Thanks for linking to my library post; I think I’ll have one for this month as well, but not about the challenge (I need some time to do a little more with that) just with ordinary loans, now that 30-some-odd “new” books have arrived “at once”.
LikeLiked by 1 person