Member B.R.Blake

My library doesn't contain every book I own, instead I'm going to use the library as a diary/log of the books I've read from now on, just to keep a note and also to motivate myself to get through those "books I want to read before I die" (at the risk of sounding incredibly morbid!)

Also, lately I've started trying to sum up the books that really touch me with just one word. I guess this is a little reductive (afterall I love the books I love precisely because of their many words)...but I'm finding its a way of recalling all that the book meant to me (a bit like a perfume recalls lots of memories). However I've started to forget my "summing up words" so I plan to make a note of them in the book reviews too.

I'm Barbara and I am, surprise surprise, a librarian...although I work in a legal library so it's safe to say its not so much about the books in this case (even during the quietest moments on the Enquiry Desk I haven't been tempted to rustle the dry leaves of Chitty on Contracts).

I do find reading is sustenance and can't imagine being without a book on the go, although I'm also an incredibly slow reader,so that "go" can be quite slow, and this only adds to what I think is the typical readerly worry of "so many books, so little time." (I honestly don't know how book prize judges get through the short lists...I've read that some read up to 3 books a day..my eyes literally water at the thought).

I am a member of two book groups...one where we actually discuss the books and the other which is just a flimsy smokescreen for getting drunk and where have been reduced to discussing the book's cover (M.J. Hyland's "How the Light Gets In" if anyone is interested, and the cover did infact quite divide the group, go on, have a look). I enjoy the surprise and the flexibility that being in a book group demands of you - in having to read things that are not on your list and you wouldn't have chosen. It does mean that I've tried things I wouldn't have otherwise and wouldn't now be without. But, it also means, combined with my tortoise-like reading pace, that huge pile of books I want to get through (many of which I've bought in the 3-for-2 offers) doesn't diminish quite as fast as I'd like!

Good old Franz Kafka said, "One should only read books which bite and sting one. If the book we are reading does not wake us up with a blow to the head, what's the point in reading? A book must be the axe which smashes the frozen sea within us." Well said Franz (although it could get a little exhausting to be continually beaten around the head, maybe I'll settle for the odd tuning fork among the axes!) But generally its in that spirit that I'm joining Library Thing, to try to find out the books that "bite and sting".