In praise of libraries

 

Budget busting!

I'm guessing that regular readers of the blog will realise that I am a voracious and omnivorous reader with a serious book habit... one that there's no way I could afford to sustain if I had to buy all the books I read. 

While I am lucky that I have access to advance reading copies of some books through various projects and NetGalley there is no way that I could read so much without my local library.

I reserve a lot of books that I see mentioned in reviews, as well as books by authors that I love and I can't think of a visit to my local branch that didn't see me pick up at least one new book.

The library staff often laugh at me and sometimes question how I have the time to read all that I borrow, and I'm not sure that they believe me when I say that I don't read them all.

I should also mention that thanks to the extensive free loans for eMagazines and eNewspapers both Mr Norfolkbookworm and I get to read/skim though a lot of these each month and not buying them saves a lot of money in subscriptions as well as cutting down the amount of paper needed/recycled each week. Neither of us make much use of the free eAudiobooks that are also available but again these are huge money savers.

Back to books...

The reasons I borrow books are varied but I've been thinking about the main ones:

1) Typeface/size - since my brain haemorrhage I have found that some type faces are really hard for me to concentrate on and if the print is too small or dense I just can't get on with it at all. This means that I either abandon a book or look for the eBook version which allows me to fiddle with this.

2) Content - some books sound intriguing from a review but I'm not 100% certain that they are for me, so borrowing the book lets me try it out and really widens my reading at little cost.

3) Space - if I had to find physical bookshelf space for all I read I'd have to live in a mansion (and while I'd love a house with a library reading room that isn't possible where we live now). Even if they were all eBooks I think I'd need two Kindles to keep them all on!

4) Paying authors - each loan of a library book has a financial benefit for nearly all authors illustrators, editors, translators or audiobook narrators. This can be up to £6600 and a real game changer for a lot of people. I know that buying books from charity shops/second hand bookshops does mean the author was paid for the initial purchase but each & every loan counts towards PLR.

5) Timeliness - I'm lucky in that I live in a county with an excellent library service that usually gets new books pretty much on the day of publication, and for popular books usually in good quantities so even if there is a waiting list it isn't too long. They also often by eBooks which doubles the availability. The team also take recommendations and try to fulfil suggestions for new books. With the amount I read I'd have to wait for the paperback to come out to even come close to affording the books so getting them so quickly is brilliant.

And then the big one...

Cost - reservations in my county are just 80p* and as the average hardback price is now £22.00 and £9.99 for paperbacks this is an absolute bargain when you consider how much my current reads/reservations would cost:

• Current loans - £112.96
• Awaiting collection - £98.76
• Reserved and coming soon - £178.97

That's a grand total of £390.89 worth of books (if bought full price from an independent bookshop) for just £16.80 of reservation fees.

And this is just my October loans... this month is slightly different to others because so many new hardbacks come out for the Christmas market but still,  there's usually around 10 books on my reservations list at any one time.

The great thing about using the library and getting the books so cheaply means that my monthly book budget can then be spent with independent publishers who often have beautiful editions of quirky books that I'm keen to own, even if it will take me years to read them all!

These are just my personal reasons for why I love libraries so much - lets not also forget to celebrate all the other things that they can offer to so many people (study support, mobile libraries, free computers, warm spaces, social activities, children's sessions, business support, local history resources...) and to always support them if they become threatened with closure or budget cuts as the cost of living crisis and government black holes deepen.

*full disclosure here - I work for the library service and thus don't pay for reservations but even before this I did reserve about as many books and would continue to do so if this privilege was removed.

Micro Reviews 76 and 77

 

The Wild Robot and The Wild Robot Escapes by Peter Brown (Hachette Book Group)

I think that someone made me aware of the first book in this pair at some point last year so I was aware of the book but when Kentishbookboy said that the 2^nd book was on his Christmas list I decided it was time to have a proper look at them.

I’m so pleased that I did – these are just wonderfully gentle books that have some huge messages to share with readers, but these are woven into the plot so naturally that it isn’t until you close the book you realise just how profound the books are.

In book one there is a shipwreck and a robot, called Roz, somehow survives and washes up on a remote island where she boots up in to life. She is a complete innocent at first and slowly starts to work out how to survive, despite the harsh conditions and unfriendly animals already living on the island.

There is lots of peril, lots of learning and also lots of happy events as Roz finds her place on the island. The final adventure is incredibly gripping but as this sets up book 2 I’m not going to talk about it and give away the details.

In a gentle and natural way the book is about loneliness, prejudice, fear, finding a home, being different, and how your family doesn’t have to be traditional. The sequel includes these themes too, along with the dangers of unrestricted use of AI, grief, and depression. But again you don’t realise this until after you’ve shut the book and start thinking about it.

I like that the idea that Isaac Asimov’s laws of robotics are obeyed in this story even as we suspend belief in that Roz doesn’t need to top up her charge at any point…

I adored these two books, and the short chapters made them ideal for reading whilst in the queue for rides at Disneyland Paris – huge thanks to Norfolk Libraries ebook offer which meant I could download the 2^nd book in France as soon as I’d finished the first one!

The nature theme continues

 

"What To Look For in..." text E.L. Grant Watson , Illustrator C. F. Tunnicliffe. Ladybird Nature Books

own books

My interest in nature and nature writing hasn't waned after my Wainwright reading, and nor has my enthusiasm for being outdoors and looking at the world around me. This quartet of books makes the most of these facts.

Unlike spotter's guides or the i-Spy books these books are written as a narrative and are matched with beautiful pictures of the countryside.

I'm not 100% certain which came first, the picture or the text, but it really doesn't matter as both are fabulous and if you can't get out in to the countryside for any reason then these books are a way to take a walk. They are also a form of time travel - they date back to the late 1950s and very early 1960s!

As well as being able to use these as a guide on what to look for while we are out an about in Norfolk (or further afield) I'm also going to find it interesting to see what changes have occurred in the 60 years since they were written. Have the seasons shifted date? What species were common but are now more scarce? The one that instantly leapt out was the lapwing, in these books they feature in every season and in large numbers. Even though we live in an area with lots of nature reserves and birding opportunities we do now only see them in small numbers and people seem very excited to see them.

The biggest changes that I can see from  just looking at the pictures is not to the natural world, but rather to farming, despite there being some machinery in the pictures it is clear that it was a really labour intensive industry just 60 years ago, and that apart from replacing the horse with a tractor not a lot else had changed. Yesterday Mr Norfolkbookworm and I watched one combine harvester and one trailer harvest nearly an entire field during our half hour walk.

These books were republished in 2020 and  I have these new editions on order from the library - I'm intrigued to see the new images and if the text has been rewritten for the 21st Century. 

Right now to look more closely at Autumn so I know what to be looking out for (and also marking all of the things I've already seen whilst still in summer...

Micro Review 30

 

The Passenger by Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz, trans. Philip Boehm. (Pushkin Press)

How to talk about this book? Set in November 1938 in the few days after Kristallnacht it follows Otto Silbermann as he travels around Germany looking for peace and an escape route.

The tension mounts with each journey Otto takes as he frantically tries to stay a free man despite being Jewish. At times it feels more of a roller coaster than a succession of train journeys made by Otto as he crisscrosses Germany.

What is so interesting about this book is that Boschwitz wrote the book in the weeks just after Kristallnacnt and it is an immediate response to the events that saw German Jews villified, arrested and finally imprisoned in concentration camps.

To say I enjoyed the book is impossible - mainly because of the subject - but it was utterly compelling and I had my heart in my mouth repeatedly. It doesn't have a neat ending, and many story threads are left dangling but that is how it has to be - it is a contemporary response to the events of 1938. Otto won't know how his story ends and thus it is right that we don't - that we have to use our imaginations.

The tight focus on Otto took some getting used to as I started the book, I wanted to know more about the supporting characters that we meet. By the end however this tunnel vision worked for me as it conveyed the fear, paranoia and claustrophobia of what life in Germany must have been like for a Jew in 1938.

Boschwitiz's own story is no less compelling and shocking than Otto's and I do urge you to give this book a go if you come across it, so very different than other novels I've read set around this time.

Many thanks to Norfolk Libraries for buying the book after I mentioned it.

Books about Books and never ending reading lists

 

Down the rabbit hole thanks to Norfolk Library and Information Service

I’ve become very meta at present and many of the books I’ve been reading have been about reading or books. I think that perhaps my (not so) inner bookworm is out of control…

First up was Reading the World by Ann Morgan. This book charts her experiences of spending a year, 2012, in trying to read a book from every country.

This wasn’t as easy as you’d think as there’s a lot of dispute about who does appear on such a list – as Morgan found this is an incredibly fraught issue with many possible answers.

Her next issue was finding books that she could physically read – not very much literature gets translated into English in the grand scheme of things.

Then there was the issue of  finding the books (not every nation has a proud written word culture) and then getting them to England for reading.

The book wasn’t so much about the books read for the project as the process around it, however all of Morgan’s reviews are still available on her blog – along with lists of other books that could have been chosen but weren’t.

 

Next was Stig Abell’s Things I learned on the 6.28: a guide to reading. In 2019 Abell decided to focus the reading he undertook on his morning commute in an attempt to expand his reading, and looks at genres in more detail. Each month had a different theme such as Poetry, Shakespeare, American Fiction, and then Abell mixes his thoughts on the books with his daily diary and his research in to the author/genre.

As the world changed so much in 2020 this book felt a little bit like a historical document as I read it but dipping in and out reading a month at a time I found I really enjoyed this book, and like the best books about books I have added a fair few new titles to my “I’ll read these one day” list.

 

The final book in this genre for now is Tom Mole’s The Secret Life of Books: why they mean more than words. Unlike the other two books this isn’t about specific titles but is all about what the book as a physical object means to a person.

The 8 chapters take themes like Book/Life or Book/Self and then explore what the book brings to each of these areas, a lot of what Mole says resonates with my thinking on the topic – especially in light of reading Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own last year. Spread through the book are also some works of art that feature books and Mole explores what the books have to say about the paintings which is fascinating and a topic I’d like to read more about!

 

Three very different books and ones that have made me think a lot about my own reading. I love translated fiction and so will definitely be using Morgan’s books to learn more about literature from other countries, and Abell’s focused reading was inspiring.

However I can’t see myself dedicating my reading time to such specific (and limiting) projects. I look at my ‘to read’ pile and think that I should read all of that before anything new comes along. I am trying to read more from it but I’d hate not being able to read something new and exciting that came my way, and it would stop me from taking part in some of the exciting projects that do cross my path.

Reading is a pleasure and I want to keep it that way, several times while reading Morgan and Abell I got the feeling that their projects had become a chore. I want books and reading to stay as personal and pleasurable as possible – for as Mole says, the book really is a wonderful item.

Busy month and book guilt

 

Tsundoku

While the first relaxation of this lockdown's rules hasn't impacted on us much (we live too far from family to be able to meet up for an al fresco lunch) we have definitely been enjoying travelling a little further from home for our walks.

The upside to this is that we are spending more time outdoors than we were, and as the days get longer and the temperatures are in theory getting warmer (as I type this I can hear the sleet/hail hitting the window) I am spending less time curled up with a book. Right now this trade off is fine with me - it has felt a long dark winter and no longer having to travel by book is pleasing.

I have still been reading, and since finishing my World Book Night challenge I have spent some time catching up on some of the advance reading copies supplied by Net Galley - look out for reviews and thoughts on these as it gets closer to their publication dates, I've read through some of the library reservations that have come in for me, and I've also been reading for another of my projects.

The one pile of books I've been neglecting however is the stack of physical books that I've bought or been sent (by friends and publishers) over the past few months and I think that the time has come to set some discipline in my reading - for every advance copy pr ebook I read I should read one from the physical stack of books. 

I think that this challenge might be harder than any I've set before - but if I don't start making in roads into these physical piles there is a huge danger that one of them will fall over and crush me! I know that sounds a little like hyperbole but I was good recently and sorted all my books - the ones I've read are on shelves and the unread ones are in boxes/piles all over the house (and yes this is so Mr Norfolkbookworm doesn't work out just how many there are!) 

I justify these quantities by saying that I've been supporting independent publishers and bookshops but the truth is I have very little self control when it comes to books and the pleasure of a new book is one I cannot resist. Some people have taken up sensible projects during the pandemic - I've just grown stacks of books...

In my defence there is some evidence that I can show restraint. I use an app to list the books I hear or read about and want to read. Currently there are 312 books on that list and (only) 25 are marked as 'owned but not read' the trouble is every time I open a paper, magazine or Twitter I see more I want to read.

Now of course I will go an prevaricate over these piles of books and try to pick one to read, I am wondering about either getting Mr Norfolkbookworm to pick one for me or perhaps lining them all up with their spines hidden and picking one at random - who am I kidding first I need to look through the review sections in the papers to see what is published this week...

My name is Sarah and I suffer from tsundoku

Micro Review 11

 

March (volumes 1-3) by John Lewis, Andrew Aydin and Nate Powell (published by Top Shelf Productions)

Summer 2020 has been marked with many demonstrations in the UK and USA regarding the Black Lives Matters movement and I have been trying to learn more about the histories and politics around this movement.

A 'you've read x why not try y' recommendation lead me to this wonderful graphic memoir about Congressman John Lewis and his non violent struggles within the American Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. 

The book is framed with by the first inauguration of President Obama and in flash backs tells Lewis' story to show how the struggles of Lewis and others paved the way for the election of a black man as president.

I knew some of the history of the Civil Rights Movement but not much beyond the 'big' moments. This series of 3 books taught me so much more. It isn't a hagiography of Lewis or the Civil Rights Movement and I am sure a lot of things were missed out but it clearly presents history (flattering or not) in a way that packed more of a punch than just a straight biography/autobiography every could.

I'm not a great one for comics/graphic novels as I've said before but discovering a new non-fiction read in the genre was brilliant and as Congressman Lewis died while I was midway through the series (the books were popular on the Norfolk Library e-book catalogue and I had to wait for my reservation on each volume) it seemed a doubly timely read.

Reading Challenge Updates

Personal Reading Challenges.

As was proved in 2017 I really suck at reading challenges, even ones I set myself for fun!

This year I am trying to do a little better. My job has changed somewhat and for the first time in 21 years I am not working directly with books, authors and readers.
As I've survived a brain hemorrhage and regained the ability to read it feels very important to not lose my book world knowledge or my love of books.

I belong to an online book discussion group linked to Norfolk's libraries and for this we created two challenges for 2018.

One is a simple monthly challenge:

And so far I have managed to complete the first quarter's challenges

• In January I read Flat Share by Beth O'Leary
• In February I started If Cats Disappeared from the World by Genki Kawamura, a book I only bought because I fell in love with the cover! (I didn't actually finish this one in Feb but I'm counting it as a challenge sucess!)
• In March my reservations for Two Weeks in Florence and Yesterday Morning by Diana Athill arrived and I enjoyed both of these short books, one a diary of a holiday to Italy and the other a memoir of a Norfolk Childhood.

We also launched a bingo style challenge to inspire reading:

Without even realising it I have actually 'ticked' many of the boxes here as many of my reads do tick more than one box!

• Is a story about a real character - Becoming Mrs Lewis
• A debut novel - The Flat Share
• A number in the title - Vintage 1954
• Set during war time - Island Song
• A non fiction book - The Cut Out Girl
• Award Winning - The Cut Out Girl
• A book from my wishlist - Chasing the Sun
• An item from a library that is new to me - Beauchamp Hall
• Read a children's book/watch a children't film - The Lego Movie 2
• Read a book set in Norfolk - Beauchamp Hall
• Read a book in translation - Vintage 1954

If I do complete this one, I might go back and try to get a unique item for each prompt.

Just this week one of my closet friends shared the reading challenge that she has developed as part of her job and I am tempted to start that one too.

I think that I like these challenges so much because I don't have to read anything set but can retrofit my choices!

Writing back to books

Book Review

Dear Fahrenheit 451 by Annie Spence

I am still struggling with reading narrative fiction, I think it is getting better but retaining a complicated plot with multiple characters is still too hard. Books of letters however are ideal and I was very excited to come across this mentioned in a catalogue and then to discover that it was a book I could borrow from the library.

Annie Spence has written letters to books that have had an effect on her - whether positive or negative and all these notes are wonderful and often hilarious. Not only are they heartfelt but often they are written in a pastiche of the original which just adds an extra dimension.

Spence talks about many books that I am familiar with, which makes me think we are of a similar age (or have at least worked in the book world for a similar time) and there are many books I have added to my must read or reread lists. Her asides about working in libraries also give an insight into some of the other things we do as well as stamping books!

The end of the book is comprised of amusing articles full of book recommendations, the one called I'd rather be reading: Excuses to tell you friends so you can stay home with your books made me laugh a lot. I also like the article about how books lead to other books, taking The Virgin Suicides as a starting point Spence then takes us on a journey through 10 books that lead on from each other.

I do enjoy books about books and this one is a real treat, now to keep building my reading stamina so I can enjoy all the new titles I've added to lists!