Save Our Libraries Day and a review

I know I don't need to enumerate here for my lovely blog readers the reasons we need to save our libraries from the government slashfest, but it I'd just like to mark Save Our Libraries Day here.

And if you will permit me a little wander down memory lane... Those Saturday mornings when I escaped from the house and entered those oases (we lived in several different places) smelling of wood and paper and, oh, centuries of wisdom and dreams which in turn could transport you to a possibility-filled future... In the library you were no longer the eleven-, thirteen-year-old daughter of, sister of, pupil of... You felt part, however novice, of a vast intellectual and creative community. It gave me a sense of my right to belong to that community which otherwise, in spite of my parents' encouragement, I may never have had...

To turn to writing news: Many thanks to Womagwriter for reviewing The Birth Machine. Interestingly, unlike others she feels that she may have preferred the earlier published edition, and feels that in any case the book still reads as 'a plea for natural childbirth, and minimum intervention' (I say in my Author's Note that people took the first edition as a plea for natural childbirth rather than as a plea for logical thinking). Well, I guess when it comes down to it the book does argue for minimum intervention (as minimum as possible in each case) as a result of logical thinking (though to me that's not the same thing at all as as an argument for natural childbirth), and it's interesting to see how one's work ends up striking other people, whatever one's intentions.

New series: Libraries I Love: Liverpool Central Library

Thought I'd start a new occasional series, or two: profiling libraries and bookshops in which I come across my books being stocked and which needless, to say, I fall instantly in love with (if I'm not already). Last week of course I wrote about Walkden Library, where I had a really great time giving a reading, though I didn't provide a picture of its plush yet airy reading room, and will now:

Of course I've written previously about Manchester Central Library, where I've read twice in the stunningly wood-panelled committee room (and which is due to close for three years for redesign and refurbishment.) Yesterday I took a trip to Liverpool, specifically to the Central Library for a networking day for librarians and writers in the North West, organised by Jane Mathieson, the Regional Reader Development Co-ordinator. Jane explained to us that the Reader Development initiative is an attempt to redress the balance after the push towards IT shifted the focus of libraries, and to reassert the prime role of libraries in developing people's relationships with books. Inviting writers into libraries is part of the initiative.

I had never before set foot in Liverpool Central Library, built in 1860, and it is the most magnificent building: rather imposingly Neo-Classical on the outside as can be seen above, but beautiful on the inside with a mezzanine gallery in the circular original reading room I passed through, accessed by a spiral staircase worked in decorative ironwork.


There are later additions to the building, and here, in the fiction section near the more modern entrance I found my story collection, Balancing on the Edge of the World, on a shelf: