Tag Archives: libraries

Love Your Library, May 2023

By Rebecca Foster on | 18 Comments

Thanks to Elle for her monthly contribution, Laura for her great reviews of two high-profile novels, Birnam Wood and Pod, borrowed from her local library, and Naomi for the write-up of her recent audiobook loans, a fascinating selection of nonfiction and middle grade fiction. I forgot to link to Jana’s post last month, so here’s her April reading, another very interesting set.

My biggest news this month is that we now have a Little Free Library in my neighbourhood. This project was several years in the making as we waited for permissions and funding. The box (and a wooden bench next to it) were hand-crafted by my very talented neighbours, and the mayor of Newbury came to officially open it on the 7th. There are also a few planters of perennials and a small cherry tree. It really cheers up what used to be a patch of bare grass next to a parking area.

I’m the volunteer curator/librarian/steward so will ensure that the shelves are tidy and the stock keeps turning over. I try to stop by daily since it’s only around the corner from my house. We’ve ordered a charter sign to link us up with the organization and put us on the official map. Anyone visiting Newbury might decide to come find it. (I, for one, look out for LFLs wherever I go, from Pennsylvania to North Uist!)

My library reading and borrowing since last month. I’m back in the States for a visit just now, so don’t currently have any library books on the go. It felt prudent to clear the decks, but I’ll have a big stack waiting for me when I come back!

 

READ

 

SKIMMED

  • Fire Rush by Jacqueline Crooks
  • You Are Not Alone by Cariad Lloyd

CHECKED OUT, TO BE READ

RETURNED UNFINISHED

  • All the Men I Never Married by Kim Moore – I hadn’t heard of the poet and had never read anything from the publisher, but took a chance. I got to page 16. It’s fine: poems about former love interests, whether they be boyfriends or aggressors. There looks to be good variety of structure. I just didn’t sense adequate weight.
  • The Furrows by Namwali Serpell – My apologies to Laura! (This started off as a buddy read.) I pushed myself through the first 78 pages, but once it didn’t advance in the Carol Shields Prize race there was no impetus to continue and it just wasn’t compelling enough to finish.

 

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.

Posted in: Love Your Library | Tagged: , , , , , ,

Love Your Library, April 2023

By Rebecca Foster on | 18 Comments

Cheers to Elle and Laila for participating this month! Thanks also to Laura for her review of The Marriage Portrait and Naomi for a write-up of her recent Atlantic Canada reads, all from the library.

Last month Jana mentioned the non-media items that her library lends out. This reminded me of some interesting kits my library system offers: “wellbeing bags” (a joint venture with the local council) that contain an identical assortment of colouring sheets, card games, short self-help books and language learning tools; and “Reminiscence Collection” boxes specific to a particular decade or experience, geared towards the elderly. I wonder if they have been found to be helpful when working with people with dementia.

Yesterday was the start of National Library Week in the USA. Book banning and censorship are, alas, perennial news items in relation to libraries there. This week the Washington Post’s Ron Charles featured the Llano County, Texas counter-protests in his newsletter (so often my source of bookish news). The list of books banned is ridiculous. A federal judge in Austin paused the bans, prompting county commissioners to float the idea of closing down the library system entirely. Many turned out to support keeping the libraries open. You can read more about the case here.

As for my own library reading since last time (some great stuff this month!):

 

READ

  • Old Babes in the Wood by Margaret Atwood
  • Old God’s Time by Sebastian Barry
  • Children of Paradise by Camilla Grudova*
  • Two Sisters by Blake Morrison
  • The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O’Farrell
  • Rain by Don Paterson
  • Of Mutability by Jo Shapcott (a re-read)
  • Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog by Dylan Thomas

*My first-ever e-book loan! I couldn’t figure out how to get the file to open on my e-reader, so I read it on my PC screen, 10 pages or so at a time, as a break between doing other things.

 

CURRENTLY READING

  • I Can’t Date Jesus: Love, Sex, Family, Race, and Other Reasons I’ve Put My Faith in Beyoncé by Michael Arceneaux
  • Shadow Girls by Carol Birch
  • Fire Rush by Jacqueline Crooks
  • The Cats We Meet Along the Way by Nadia Mikail
  • All the Men I Never Married by Kim Moore
  • The Boy Who Lost His Spark by Maggie O’Farrell
  • The Furrows by Namwali Serpell
  • Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont by Elizabeth Taylor (a re-read for book club)
  • Glowing Still: A Woman’s Life on the Road by Sara Wheeler
  • In Memoriam by Alice Winn

SKIMMED

  • This Is How Your Marriage Ends: A Hopeful Approach to Saving Relationships by Matthew Fray
  • Cuddy by Benjamin Myers
  • Between the Chalk and the Sea by Gail Simmons
  • The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher by Kate Summerscale (a re-read for book club)

 

RETURNED UNFINISHED

  • How Not to Drown in a Glass of Water by Angie Cruz – I read the first 40 pages. A voice-driven novel about a middle-aged immigrant re-entering the work force, it has a certain charm but also (the Spanglish!) a slightly irksome quality.
  • Milk by Alice Kinsella – I was enjoying this a lot and had gotten to page 116 before it was requested on an interlibrary loan. I’ll pick it back up as soon as it returns to West Berkshire.

 

RETURNED UNREAD

  • The Book of Eve by Meg Clothier – The first few pages didn’t grab me, but maybe I’d try it another time.
  • The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid – This seems like it would make a good holiday read, so I’ll wait until the demand for it dies down and try it later on.
  • A Complicated Matter by Anne Youngson – This was requested; I was also doubtful that I felt like reading yet another WWII novel just now.

 

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.

Posted in: Love Your Library | Tagged: , , , , ,

Love Your Library, March 2023

By Rebecca Foster on | 18 Comments

Thanks to Naomi for writing about her fascinating selection of recent library audiobook reads, all of them nonfiction; plus several Canadian novels read from the library. I appreciate Elle for being my most faithful participant; here’s her latest borrowings. And welcome to Jana, who has contributed for the first time with a post about what her library system has to offer: the different ways she can access audiobooks, the non-media items that can be borrowed (such as gardening tools from a Library of Things), and take-home activity kits.

Have you heard of the “Human Library”? The tagline is “Unjudge someone.” The idea is that you sign up to hear about someone else’s experiences that are quite different to your own. Events are online or in person and have involved ‘human books’ from 85 countries. “We host events where readers can borrow human beings serving as open books and have conversations they would not normally have access to. Every human book from our bookshelf, represent a group in our society that is often subjected to prejudice, stigmatization or discrimination because of their lifestyle, diagnosis, belief, disability, social status, ethnic origin etc.” I would be fascinated to hear from anyone who has taken part in this initiative.

 

As for my own library use since last month:

READ

  • Ephemeron by Fiona Benson
  • A Fortunate Man by John Berger
  • Quiet by Victoria Adukwei Bulley
  • The Things We Do to Our Friends by Heather Darwent
  • Maame by Jessica George
  • Pure Colour by Sheila Heti
  • Cane, Corn & Gully by Safiya Kamaria Kinshasa
  • England’s Green by Zaffar Kunial
  • Martha Quest by Doris Lessing
  • Nightwalking: Four Journeys into Britain after Dark by John Lewis-Stempel
  • His Only Wife by Peace Adzo Medie
  • The Garnett Girls by Georgina Moore
  • We All Want Impossible Things by Catherine Newman
  • Manorism by Yomi Sode

 

CURRENTLY READING

  • Old God’s Time by Sebastian Barry
  • Shadow Girls by Carol Birch
  • How Not to Drown in a Glass of Water by Angie Cruz
  • This Is How Your Marriage Ends: A Hopeful Approach to Saving Relationships by Matthew Fray
  • Islamic Mystical Poetry, ed. Mahmood Jamal
  • Two Sisters by Blake Morrison
  • Rain by Don Paterson

I also have some lovely piles out from the public library and university library to read soon.

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.

Posted in: Love Your Library | Tagged: , , , ,

Love Your Library, January 2023

By Rebecca Foster on | 16 Comments

Elle has been reading loads from the library (and discovering the freedom of DNFing or not reading the library books you borrow; this is not a problem in the least, and it still helps the library’s statistics!). Naomi always finds interesting books to read and review from her library system. Margaret’s “My Life in Book Titles 2022” almost exclusively featured books she’d borrowed from libraries. Through Twitter I saw this hilarious TikTok video from Cincinnati Library about collecting book holds. If only I could be so glamorous on my Tuesday volunteering mornings. Washington Post critic Ron Charles’s weekly e-newsletter is one of my greatest bookish joys and I was delighted to see him recently highlight an initiative from my hometown’s local library system. Whenever I go on the cross trainer, I read library books or my e-reader so exercise time isn’t ‘lost’ time when I could be reading.

Since last month:

 

READ

  • A Night at the Frost Fair by Emma Carroll
  • Bournville by Jonathan Coe
  • A Heart that Works by Rob Delaney
  • The Weather Woman by Sally Gardner
  • Leila and the Blue Fox by Kiran Millwood Hargrave
  • Standard Deviation by Katherine Heiny
  • Our Missing Hearts by Celeste Ng
  • Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood by Trevor Noah

CURRENTLY READING

  • Once Upon a Tome by Oliver Darkshire
  • Martha Quest by Doris Lessing (for our women’s classics book club subgroup)
  • How to Be Sad by Helen Russell
  • Lucy by the Sea by Elizabeth Strout
  • City of Friends by Joanna Trollope (for February’s book club)
  • Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner

 

My library system has a ton of new books on order – I set up an alert so I would be e-mailed a weekly digest of all 2023 adult fiction and nonfiction releases added to the catalogue – so my reservation queue is nearly full now with all kinds of tempting stuff, including a new biography of Katherine Mansfield and a bereavement memoir by Blake Morrison, whose And When Did You Last See Your Father? was my favourite nonfiction read of 2018. In fiction, I’m particularly excited about The New Life by Tom Crewe, How Not to Drown in a Glass of Water by Angie Cruz, and Maame by Jessica George.

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.

Posted in: Love Your Library | Tagged: , , , , , ,

Love Your Library, December 2022

By Rebecca Foster on | 23 Comments

The UK has just experienced its coldest week since 2010, so it’s no wonder we’ve been freezing here in our drafty old house. It’s turning milder (and rainy), so we hope to have it habitable for hosting my parents-in-law on Christmas day, and my sister the week after.

Margaret sent me a link to this charming story about a public library in Poland that moved its entire collection 350 meters down the road using a human chain of over 600 volunteers. Marcie sourced many of her graphic novel and poetry reads, as well as various globe-trotting stories, from the library this year. And Eleanor has been reading loads of print and e-books from her library: everything from Dickens to sci-fi. Thank you all for your contributions!

Earlier in the month my library closed to the public for two days to complete a stock take (which happens once every three years). I helped out for my usual two hours on the Tuesday morning, scanning children’s chapter books with a tiny device about the size of two memory sticks put together. We scanned the library’s nearly 50,000 on-shelf items in the equivalent of just over one working day.

All of my remaining reservations seem to have come in at once. There’s no hope of me reading all the big-name 2022 releases (such as the Booker Prize winner, and Celeste Ng’s new novel) before the end of the year, but I will see if I can manage to finish a few more that I have in progress.

 

Since last month:

READ

CURRENTLY READING

  • Horse by Geraldine Brooks
  • A Heart that Works by Rob Delaney
  • Leila and the Blue Fox by Kiran Millwood Hargrave
  • Standard Deviation by Katherine Heiny
  • Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner

RETURNED UNFINISHED

 

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.

Posted in: Love Your Library | Tagged: , , , ,

September Releases by John Clegg & Tom Gauld (Lots More to Come!)

By Rebecca Foster on | 12 Comments

There aren’t enough hours in the day, or days left in this month, to write up all the terrific September releases I’ve read. The nonfiction fell into two broad thematic camps: books about books (Remainders of the Day by Shaun Bythell and Blurb Your Enthusiasm by Louise Willder still to come), or books about death (What Remains? by Rupert Callender, And Finally by Henry Marsh, and Sinkhole by Juliet Patterson still to come). However, I’ll start off with the two I happen to have written about so far, which are (the odd one out) poetry about science and watery travel, and bookish cartoons. Both:

 

Aliquot by John Clegg

This is the second Carcanet collection by the London bookseller. An aliquot is a sample, a part that represents the whole; a scientific counterpart to synecdoche. It’s a perfect word for what poetry can do: point at larger truths through the pinpricks of meaning found in the everyday. The title poem juxtaposes two moments where the poet muses on the part/whole dichotomy: watching a catering school student and teacher transferring peas from one container to another and spotting two cellists on a tube train. Drawn in by detail, we observe the inevitable movement from separation to togetherness.

A high point is “A Gene Sequence,” about an administrator working behind the scenes at a genomics conference on a Cambridge campus: each poem is named after a different amino acid and the lines (sometimes with the help of extreme enjambment) always begin with the arrangement of A, C, G, and T that encodes them. Here’s an example:

Much of the imagery is maritime, with the occasional reference to a desert (“Language as Sonora”) or settlement (“Dormer Windows” and “Quebec City”). The locations include a science campus and a storm-threatened hotel (“Hurricane Joaquin,” one of my favourites). A proverb is described as being as potent as a raw onion. Here’s a lynx you’ll never see – but she will see you. Like in a Caroline Bird collection, there’s many an absurd or imagined situation. The vocabulary is unusual, sometimes lofty: “their cursory repertoire of query.” Alliteration teems, as in “The High Lama Explains How Items Are Procured for Shangri-La.” Overall, a noteworthy and unique collection that I’d recommend.

A favourite, apropos of nothing stanza from “Lucan – The Waterline”:

There is a kind of crab known to devour human flesh.

There is a shelf five storeys undersea

Where small yachts pile up like bric-a-brac.

There is a town in Maryland called Alibi.

With thanks to Carcanet for the advanced e-copy for review.

 

Revenge of the Librarians by Tom Gauld

You have probably seen Gauld’s cartoons in the Guardian, New Scientist or New Yorker. I’ve saved clippings of my favourite bookish ones over the years. They’re full of literary in-jokes and bibliophile problems, and divided about equally between a writer’s perspective and a reader’s: the struggle for inspiration and novelty on the one hand, and the battle with the TBR and the impulse to read what one feels one should versus what one enjoys on the other. He pokes holes in the pretensions on either side. Jane Austen features frequently.

Gauld’s figures are usually blocky stick figures without complete facial features (or books or ghosts), and he often makes use of multiple choice and choose your own adventure structures. Elsewhere he plays around with book titles and typical plots, or stages mild-mannered arguments between authors and their editors or publicists, who generally have quite different notions of quality and marketability.

Lest you dismiss cartoons as being out of touch, the effect of the pandemic on bookshops, libraries and literary events is mentioned a few times. Librarians are depicted as old-time gangsters peddling books while their buildings are closed: “Overdue books are dealt with swiftly and mercilessly” it reads under a panel of a fedora-wearing, revolver-toting figure warning, “The boss says if you ain’t finished ‘The Mirror and the Light’ by tomorrow, it’s curtains!”

Some more favourite lines:

  • “1903: Henry James writes a sentence so long and circuitous that he becomes lost inside it for three days.”
  • (says one pigeon to another) “I’ve become a psychogeographer. It’s mainly walking around disapproving of gentrification.”
  • “A horrible feeling crept over Elaine that perhaps the problems with her novel couldn’t be overcome by changing the font.”

Two spreads that are too good not to share in full (I feel seen!):

And would you look at this attention to detail on the inside cover!

This is destined for many a book-lover’s Christmas stocking.

With thanks to Canongate for the free copy for review.

 

Tempted to read one of these?
What other September releases can you recommend?
Posted in: Fiction Reviews, Poetry Reviews | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Love Your Library, June 2022

By Rebecca Foster on | 18 Comments

In the past month we’ve had visits to libraries in Canada and Catalonia – thanks to Marcie and Margaret for sharing about these.

It’s been good to see more activities resuming at my local library, where I volunteer twice a week. In recent months I’ve noticed the upstairs meeting room being used for Lego building and flower arranging, as well as for reading group discussions.

When it comes to library material, I’ve been borrowing much more than I’ve been reading. I stocked up in advance of our Scotland holiday – even though we’re travelling by train, bus and ferry, so I haven’t been able to take very many books with me.

This is what I’ve gotten to since last month:

 

READ

  • The Dance Tree by Kiran Millwood Hargrave
  • The Feast by Margaret Kennedy
  • A Parrot in the Pepper Tree by Chris Stewart
  • The Murderer’s Ape by Jakob Wegelius

(I reviewed the above four across my Spain trip and 20 Books of Summer posts.) 

 

CURRENTLY READING

  • Orchid Summer by Jon Dunn
  • Secrets of the Sea House by Elisabeth Gifford
  • Black Narcissus by Rumer Godden
  • This Is Not a Pity Memoir by Abi Morgan
  • The Summer of the Bear by Bella Pollen

 

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.

Posted in: Love Your Library | Tagged: , ,

Love Your Library, April 2022

By Rebecca Foster on | 20 Comments

“Here on 42nd Street it was less elegant but no less strange. He loved this street, not for the people or the shops but for the stone lions that guarded the great main building of the Public Library, a building filled with books and unimaginably vast, and which he never dared to enter. He might, he knew, for he was a member of the branch in Harlem and was entitled to take books from any library in the city. But he had never gone in because the building was so big that it must be full of corridors and marble steps, in the maze of which he would be lost and never find the book he wanted. And then everyone, all the white people inside, would know that he was not used to great buildings, or to many books, and they would look at him with pity.”

(from Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin)

Hard to believe, but it’s already half a year since I relaunched my monthly library meme in this current form. I’m really grateful for all of you who have contributed posts and/or tagged me on social media. I love seeing what you’re reading from the library! The above quote clawed at my heart: no one should ever feel that libraries are not for them.

Annabel reviewed a new book about libraries and talked about her own experience growing up with South London’s libraries here. Eleanor and Rosemary posted photos of the books they’ve borrowed from their local libraries recently.

Elle is reading lots of Russian literature this spring, but also went on to devour most of her ‘death books’ stack within a week, and posted about them here.

 

For my part, I’m going to resurrect a format I used to use for “Library Checkout” posts to capture my library use over the past month, with links to my reviews where available:

 

READ

 SKIMMED

  • Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
  • Things I Have Withheld by Kei Miller
  • Brown Baby by Nikesh Shukla

CURRENTLY READING

  • Falling Angels by Tracy Chevalier (rereading for May’s book club meeting)
  • Bitch: The Female of the Species by Lucy Cooke
  • Empire of Wild by Cherie Dimaline
  • The Sentence by Louise Erdrich
  • Empire Antarctica by Gavin Francis
  • Devotion by Hannah Kent
  • Lean Fall Stand by Jon McGregor
  • The Exhibitionist by Charlotte Mendelson (review coming tomorrow)
  • The Unadoptables by Hana Tooke
  • French Braid by Anne Tyler

CHECKED OUT, TO BE READ

(And I have a preposterous number of reservations pending.)

 

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. The project page gives an idea of what you might like to post about.

Posted in: Love Your Library | Tagged: , , , ,

Love Your Library, February 2022

By Rebecca Foster on | 16 Comments

We’re now onto the fifth month of the Love Your Library feature. A big thank you to…

  • “The Fab Four of Cley,” who run a Little Free Library in their area. They found last month’s post and gave me a link to a bilingual piece they wrote about a book sale they ran at their local church, with the thousands of books they’d amassed. Heavenly!

 

  • Margaret of From Pyrenees to Pennines for her lovely account (with photos!) of a visit to the Central Public Library of Valencia.

 

  • Mary R. of Bibliographic Manifestations for her post on interlibrary loans.

Blogger Laila of Big Reading Life also mentioned ILLs recently. I know some states and provinces are able to offer this service for free. When I lived in Maryland, statewide ILLs were free and I took full advantage of it. It’s how I binged on books by Marcus Borg, Frederick Buechner, Jan Morris, and many others during the year between my Master’s degree and moving back to England permanently. For my thesis research I’d had the University of Leeds’ ILL team get me an obscure Victorian novel on microfiche all the way from Australia. I also cheekily put through a few university ILLs for myself while I worked for King’s College London’s library system. Where I live now in the UK, a public library ILL costs £3 per book, so isn’t worth doing; you might as well find a secondhand copy at that price. I do miss the freedom of knowing that I could borrow (almost) anything I want.

 

Two funny moments from my recent library volunteering: I found Mrs Dalloway shelved under D, and an M. C. Beaton “Agatha Raisin” mystery shelved under R!

 

Read from the library recently:

The Jasper & Scruff series by Nicola Colton: Having insisted I don’t like sequels or series … I do sometimes make exceptions, like I did for these early reader books (meant for, I don’t know, maybe ages 7 to 9?). I was drawn by the grey and white cat with a bowtie – that’s Jasper, a dapper fellow who likes the fine things in life and desperately wants to be admitted to the Sophisticats’ club, until he realizes they’re snooty and just plain mean. Whereas Scruff the puppy, though he makes life messy, is loving and fun. I liked the sequels more than the original because they build on each other, bringing back characters from the earlier books for a pirate-themed scavenger hunt, a reality TV-style talent show, and bookshop and diner ventures. There are good lessons about being honest and fair, even if others are cheating to outcompete you, and being yourself instead of putting on airs. I also like the menagerie of mammals: not just dogs and cats, but African megafauna, too.

 

The Decameron Project: 29 New Stories from the Pandemic (originally published in The New York Times): Creative responses to Covid-19, ranging from the prosaic to the fantastical. I appreciated the mix of authors, some in translation and some closer to genre fiction than lit fic. Standouts were by Victor LaValle (NYC apartment neighbours; magic realism), Colm Tóibín (lockdown prompts a man to consider his compatibility with his boyfriend), Karen Russell (time stops during a bus journey), Rivers Solomon (an abused girl and her imprisoned mother get revenge), Matthew Baker (a feuding grandmother and granddaughter find something to agree on), and John Wray (a relationship starts up during quarantine in Barcelona). The best story of all, though, was by Margaret Atwood.

 

Allegorizings by Jan Morris: Disparate, somewhat frivolous essays written mostly pre-2009, or in 2013, and kept in trust by her publisher for publication as a posthumous collection, so strangely frozen in time. She was old but not super-old; thinking vaguely about death, but not at death’s door. The organizing principle, that everything can be understood on more than one level and so we must think beyond the literal, is interesting but not particularly applicable to the contents. There are mini travel pieces and pen portraits, but I got more out of the explorations of concepts (maturity, nationalism) and universal experiences (being caught picking one’s nose, sneezing).

 

The Priory by Dorothy Whipple (read for book club): A cosy between-the-wars story, pleasant to read even though some awful things happen, or nearly happen. Like in Downton Abbey and the Cazalet Chronicles, there’s an upstairs/downstairs setup that’s appealing. It was interesting to watch how my sympathies shifted. The Persephone afterword provides useful information about the Welsh house (where Whipple stayed for a month in 1934) and family that inspired the novel. Whipple is a new author for me and I’m sure the rest of her books would be just as enjoyable, but I would only attempt another if it was significantly shorter than this one.

 

Borrowed since last month:

My latest university library book haul. Paradise by Toni Morrison is to read with my women’s classics book club subgroup in mid-April. Findings is to reread just because Kathleen Jamie is amazing. The other three are in preparation for the 1954 Club coming up in April.

Do share a link to your own post in the comments, and feel free to use the above image. I’ve co-opted a hashtag that is already popular on Twitter and Instagram: #LoveYourLibrary.

Here’s a reminder of my ideas of what you might choose to post (this list will stay up on the project page):

  • Photos or a list of your latest library book haul
  • An account of a visit to a new-to-you library
  • Full-length or mini reviews of some recent library reads
  • A description of a particular feature of your local library
  • A screenshot of the state of play of your online account
  • An opinion piece about library policies (e.g. Covid procedures or fines amnesties)
  • A write-up of a library event you attended, such as an author reading or book club.

If it’s related to libraries, I want to hear about it!

Posted in: Love Your Library | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Love Your Library, January 2022

By Rebecca Foster on | 25 Comments

We’re now on the fourth month of the Love Your Library feature. First, my thanks to Mary R. of Bibliographic Manifestations for her post on the libraries she has known and loved, and Naomi M. of Consumed by Ink for her reviews of recent books she’s read from the library. Karen of Booker Talk let me share this photo she took of a beautifully refurbished chapel-turned-library local to her.

Rosemary of Scones and Chaises Longues also sent me a photo of her latest library book haul.

I’ve been back to my library volunteering this month and am starting to amass borrowed books and hold requests. In keeping with my goal of prioritizing backlist books over brand-new ones, I’ve been picking up whatever catches my eye, including some releases from last year that I missed, and some older stuff, too. All volunteers were recently given this tote bag as a thank-you.

As to what I’ve actually read from the library recently, it’s mostly selections from the Costa Awards shortlists. I read the full poetry shortlist, two as review copies and two from the library. My preferred title was Eat or We Both Starve, but The Kids (a mixed-race author’s memories of kids she’s taught, and her own coming of age, and a potential antidote to the Kate Clanchy debacle?) won. I also read Free by Lea Ypi, a delightful memoir about growing up in Albania in the 1980s and 90s that has scenes and dialogue worthy of fiction, and Fault Lines by Emily Itami, a debut novel wryly narrated by a Tokyo housewife having an affair. I’m currently halfway through Maggie Blue and the Dark World by Anna Goodall, an enjoyable middle grade novel reminiscent of classic Madeleine L’Engle and C.S. Lewis fantasy but updated to cover bullying, mental health issues and same-sex attraction.

Do share a link to your own post in the comments, and feel free to use the image below. I’ve co-opted a hashtag that is already popular on Twitter and Instagram: #LoveYourLibrary.

Here’s a reminder of my ideas of what you might choose to post (this list will stay up on the project page):

  • Photos or a list of your latest library book haul
  • An account of a visit to a new-to-you library
  • Full-length or mini reviews of some recent library reads
  • A description of a particular feature of your local library
  • A screenshot of the state of play of your online account
  • An opinion piece about library policies (e.g. Covid procedures or fines amnesties)
  • A write-up of a library event you attended, such as an author reading or book club.

If it’s related to libraries, I want to hear about it!

Posted in: Love Your Library | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , ,