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The 2022 Booker Prize longlist has been announced. I wonder which of them, if any, will make it onto the Cricklereaders reading list? I’m personally delighted to see that Alan Garner has made it into the list. One of my favourite authors from childhood, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen and The Owl Service are two books that have stayed with me across the decades. I look forward to reading Treacle Walker.
We are very excited to announce that Cricklereaders Juniors, our book group for children aged 7-11, starts in September this year.
Reading for pleasure is an important skill for children and has more impact on their life chances than that of their socio-economic background. We’re all about reading for pleasure at Cricklewood Library, and are happy to announce we’ll be encouraging even more young readers to come in, browse around, find a book to enjoy and treasure, and have fun talking about their reading adventures with our group of talented and enthusiastic volunteers.
The group will be run by local parents and grandparents, and will take place on Friday afternoons from 23 September 2022. Places are limited, so to secure yours, sign up here.
This month Cricklereaders will be enjoying Things We Lost to the Water by Eric Nguyen
A captivating novel about an immigrant Vietnamese family who settles in New Orleans and struggles to remain connected to one another as their lives are inextricably reshaped. This stunning debut is “vast in scale and ambition, while luscious and inviting … in its intimacy” (The New York Times Book Review).
When Huong arrives in New Orleans with her two young sons, she is jobless, homeless, and worried about her husband, Cong, who remains in Vietnam. As she and her boys begin to settle in to life in America, she continues to send letters and tapes back to Cong, hopeful that they will be reunited and her children will grow up with a father.
The September group will meet at the library at 1030 on Sunday 18 September. Do join in.
The Summer Reading Challenge has dropped at the library! Come in and collect your Gadgeteer pack, start reading (anything you like!) and collect stickers and digital rewards to show your progress!
For parents, this is a great way of encouraging your children’s reading over the summer, and a great way of getting them off those electronic devices while still getting a bit of peace and quiet!
This year the Reading Agency have partnered with the Science Museum, so there’s loads of activities for inventive young minds to get involved in. Sign up online here and get cracking!
This month Cricklereaders will be enjoying Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner.
From the indie rockstar Japanese Breakfast, an unflinching, powerful, deeply moving memoir about growing up mixed-race, Korean food, losing her Korean mother, and forging her own identity.
In this exquisite story of family, food, grief, and endurance, Michelle Zauner proves herself far more than a dazzling singer, songwriter, and guitarist. With humour and heart, she tells of growing up the only Asian-American kid at her school in Eugene, Oregon; of struggling with her mother’s particular, high expectations of her; of a painful adolescence; of treasured months spent in her grandmother’s tiny apartment in Seoul, where she and her mother would bond, late at night, over heaping plates of food.
As she grew up, moving to the east coast for college, finding work in the restaurant industry, performing gigs with her fledgling band – and meeting the man who would become her husband – her Koreanness began to feel ever more distant, even as she found the life she wanted to live.
It was her mother’s diagnosis of terminal pancreatic cancer, when Michelle was twenty-five, that forced a reckoning with her identity and brought her to reclaim the gifts of taste, language, and history her mother had given her.
Vivacious and plainspoken, lyrical and honest, Michelle Zauner’s voice is as radiantly alive on the page as it is onstage. Rich with intimate anecdotes that will resonate widely, Crying in H Mart is a book to cherish, share, and reread.
The August group will meet at the library at 1030 on Sunday7 August. Do join in.
This month Cricklereaders will be enjoying Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout. Here’s an intriguing snippet from the start of the book:
For many years Henry Kitteridge was a pharmacist in the next town over, driving every morning on snowy roads, or rainy roads, or summertime roads, when the wild raspberries shot their new growth in brambles along the last section of town before he turned off to where the wider road led to the pharmacy. Retired now, he still wakes early and remembers how mornings used to be his favorite, as though the world were his secret, tires rumbling softly beneath him and the light emerging through the early fog, the brief sight of the bay off to his right, then the pines …
The June group will meet at the library at 1030 on Sunday 26 June. Do join in.