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.
We’ve been open a while, so we think we’ve got the hang of this now.
With this in mind, we’re running an Open Day this Friday 3 June, where we’ll be showcasing lots of different activities that are on offer at the library. All of them will be ABSOLUTELY FREE to take part in, and there’s something for all the family to enjoy.
We are lucky to have funding for some of these activities from Local Giving and the Magic Little Grants fund.
A highly topical read for the months of April/May. We’ll be reading A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian by Marina Lewycka. Why not read along with us and then join us in the library to discuss?
We’ll meet between 1030 and 1130 in the library on Sunday 15 May.
Spaces still available in our book group. See here for details on joining.
Just a little heads-up for everyone in Council Tax bands A-D (taken from the Brent Council website):
From 1 April 2022, the energy price cap will rise and many households will struggle to pay higher energy bills and to heat their homes.
To help households with rising energy costs, the Government has announced a £150 Council Tax rebate (payment) for households in bands A to D.
Who will receive this £150 payment (rebate)?
Properties in bands A to D
Most households in Council Tax bands A to D will qualify for a payment (rebate) of £150 from April 2022. The council will make a payment to households. This won’t have to be repaid.
If you pay less than £150 Council Tax, or you receive single person discount, or do not pay because you receive Council Tax support, you will still be entitled to the payment.
The payment will not be made for empty or second homes. It must be your main residence to get the money. If you don’t know which band your property is in, look on your latest bill or check your Council Tax band online.
If you’ve seen the posters and leaflets in the library trying to tempt you into joining in the fundraising efforts but still need another bit of persuasion, take a look at this video. Last year we raised nearly £6000 for the library – can you help us do the same again this year?
The April meeting will meet on Sunday 3 April at the library, from 1030-1130. The book for this month is The Forty Rules of Love, by Turkish author Elif Shafak.
Synopsis
“A novel within a novel, The Forty Rules of Love tells two parallel stories (The technique placing two story together is called juxtaposition in literature) that mirror each other across two very different cultures and seven intervening centuries.” It starts when a housewife, Ella, gets a book called Sweet Blasphemy for an appraisal.. This book is about a thirteenth century poet, Rumi, and his spiritual teacher, Shams. The book presents Shams’s Forty Love Rules at different intervals. The story presented in the novel is basically on “love and spirituality that explains what it means to follow your heart”.
The letter “b”
Every chapter of the book starts with letter “b”. It is because the secret of Quran lies in Surah Al-Fatiha and its spirit is contained in the phrase Bismillah ir Rehman ir Rahim (In the name of Allah, the most Beneficent and the most Merciful). The first Arabic letter of the Bismillah has a dot below it that symbolizes the Universe as per Sufism thoughts.
If you’d like to join in, drop us a line to info@cricklewoodlibrary.org.uk, or just read along with us and let us know what you think!
Fancy joining a friendly, welcoming, local community choir? I know some of you do, as you’ve told me. We have a potential voiunteer choir leader and are hopeful of starting a choir in the next few months. To do this, we need to work out what the demand for this activity would be.
To help with our planning for this, please complete this questionnaire to help us work out what the choir should look like.
We are delighted to announce that, as from first week in March, we’ll be offering a free story time session twice a week in the library, run by our crack team of story telling volunteers.
The session will take place on Thursdays, between 0930 and 1000. This session is suitable for pre-school children. On Fridays Tell Me a Story will happen between 1550 and 1620, and is for all ages.
Our volunteers are fully DBS checked.
Please note, numbers are limited to 10 children/parents (or carers) due to space constraints, so please arrive early to avoid disappointment. The volunteers will not wear masks as this would interfere with the story telling, but we would appreciate it if other adults could wear masks in line with the library’s current Covid-19 policy. Parents/carers should remain with their children at all times – this is not a drop off session.
As an added bonus, we’ll be offering a book borrowing session at the end of both story times. Come along and join the fun!
We’re hoping to extend our opening hours every week by offering a session on Fridays in the after school slot between 1500 and 1800. We’ve had a lot of demand from local parents and carers of school age children for more time for borrowing after school. At the moment it can be a bit rushed to get to the library after school and to have enough time to browse before borrowing. So we hope this slot will do that. It should also give people on the way home from work a chance to pop in too, with luck.
At the moment we don’t have enough volunteers to operate a cafe service at this time, but we’ll get there as soon as we can. In the meantime, we could always do with more volunteers – sign up here.
