A local group, who assist adults with learning difficulties, come into our library fairly regularly on a Friday morning. They always manage to time it for our busiest period, when we also have a toddler group doing music time, so they often wander into the middle of a group of twenty toddlers and their grown-ups doing the hokey-cokey.
(As a side note, yeah, I think we’re quite a non-traditional library. We almost never shush people. The only time I’ve ever told someone off was when one grandpa ignored the sign saying DO NOT TOUCH THE LOBSTERS.)(That was the day we had lobsters visiting the library.)
So anyway, one of the women who comes along with the care group is super-keen on the royal family, especially Princess Diana. She has already read all the books we have on the shelves about the Royals. I always feel a bit sad when we can’t find her anything knew to read. Plus she needs a specific type of book – preferably one with less writing and more pictures. So I ducked out to the stacks in the other room, where we keep our thousands of home library service books, and had a quick rummage in the Royal section. Long story short, I came up with three nice big picture books, including one of Charles and Diana that predated Diana’s death.
I figured this was a fairly average, everyday thing to do – I mean, it’s literally my job to find books for people. But this woman was so happy to see this new selection of books that she got completely overwhelmed and on the verge of tears. She had to ask her carer whether she could borrow all three books instead of the one she usually gets (obviously the carer said yes). Usually the woman gives me a high-five before she leaves; today I got a hug. Hence why I was crying like an eejit at lunchtime.
(Also, the Charles and Diana book had not been borrowed since 1997, and I’d just been reading this thread on Twitter about neglected library books, so that set me off again.)
At the risk of sounding super-pretentious, it turns out distributing a hundred books to a hundred people isn’t necessarily as important as getting one particular book to the right person at the right time.
Anyway. Back to my 2020 reading project.
The first book of the year was THE BEHAVIOUR OF MOTHS by Poppy Adams. You can check out my less-than-comprehensive review here.
We now move on to the B shelves.
There are NINETEEN of these buggers. Nineteen. I haven’t even counted how many separate authors that includes. So, with the help of a random number generator, I picked shelf number 10:
Which is... hmm. Well, I guess this was bound to happen. Quite a lot of these shelves are taken up by just two or three authors (and sometimes just one – Danielle Steele has two full shelves to herself) so sometimes I won’t have a huge choice. This fortnight we’ve got Maeve Binchy, Tim Binding, and Charlotte Bingham. I’ve not read any of these people. None of these books look like my usual comfort zone.
I eventually settled on Maeve Binchy:
It’s a solid, hefty tome of a book.
I’ll post an update at the weekend to see how I’m getting on. At that time, I will hopefully also have SOME EXCITING NEWS about another new project we’re working on. It’s gonna be awesome.
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