Pauline reflects on our love of all things libraries…
Story Cafe 28th September
Wendy introduced our theme by saying that Libraries Week is an annual showcase and celebration of the best that libraries can offer, quoting authors acknowledging their debt to public libraries.
Barbara Kingsolver: “I loved the library…I would hide…reading…these secret worlds I could enter was quite thrilling” Amy Tan: “I read every fairy tale I could lay my hands on at the Public Library” Angie Thomas: “Books allowed me to see that there was more to the world than my neighborhood” Ursula Le Guin: “A library is a focal point, a sacred place in the community”
Wendy then read from The Reading List by Sara Nisha Adams , who is a London-based Indian-English writer. The novel was inspired by her grandfather. A faded list of nine titles on a scrappy piece of paper, found in the local library by Aleisha’s brother Aidan, brings reluctant librarian Aleisha and Mukesh, an older widower, into an inter-generational friendship. As they work their way through the list, their worries begin to slip away…
The list is headed:
Just in case you need it
To Kill a Mockingbird
Rebecca
The Kite Runner
Life of Pi
Pride and Prejudice
Little Women
Beloved
A Suitable Boy
In the discussion that followed, we spoke about “comfort reads”, whether we ever re-read novels, exploring our own lives through fiction, finding comfort in poetry and the importance of libraries as a resource for the whole community.
After the break, Wendy and I read from A Velocity of Being: letters to a young reader (which has the most beautiful of illustrations), edited by Maria Popova and Claudia Bendick. I loved this quote by writer and activist Rebecca Solnit “each [book] is a gift a writer made for strangers” and by poet and naturalist Diane Ackerman “books are borrowed minds…they explore and celebrate all it means to be human”.
We finished with two poems Because of libraries we can say these things by Palestinian/American poet Naomi Shihab Nye and one of my poems Living in Novels.
We all left even more in love with libraries than when we arrived!
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