Category Archives: Reading

March 5, 2020 · 10:37 am

Children of the revolution – the sequel

Back in March 2017 I wrote the post below about World Book Day. I’ve not idea what the article was that I had read at the time, but sadly I imagine that things haven’t changed much. Last year rather than ask people to create expensive costumes to celebrate World Book Day one school in York asked children to bring in a book from home. Over 50% of the children didn’t have a book to bring in.

However one thing has changed since 2017. I mention in the post that I would like to find all these people without books and give them one. Well giving a book to everyone might have been a bit of a tall order but I’ve certainly made a start. Having set up a charity called Bookcase For All we have given away over 2000 books last year, over 600 of these were to schools, so I like to think we have made a small difference. Hopefully by this time next year we will have given away lots more!

http://www.bookcaseforall.co.uk

Children of the Revolution – March 2017

As you all hopefully know, today is World Book Day. In fact it is the 20th anniversary of the day. I can imagine for parent’s the joy of this day is slightly tempered by the need to suddenly create an entire Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory out of an old washing up liquid bottle, an egg box and some sticky back plastic, but to me it’s a really positive day.

Everywhere you go people are talking about books. On the radio, in the papers, even people in the office are showing off pictures of their nephews and nieces dressed as book characters and discussing what they read as a child. Books are such exciting things.  Therefore I was rather surprised to read in the paper that last year 25% of children between eight and 11 had used their £1 book token to buy their first ever book. Don’t get me wrong I think it’s great that the day allowed all those children to buy books. I just can’t imagine not having bought a book by the age of eight.

Admittedly I don’t actually remember buying books when I was eight, that was what parent’s and adults were for. Yet I remember books being everywhere, and I was a child before Harry Potter had even been thought of. We still had Enid Blyton, lots of books about girls with ponies, and of course what is still one of my favourites today, Winnie the Pooh. Even if we weren’t buying books, there were regular family trips to the local library or at one point there was a mobile library which came to us, books on wheels. Libraries were a great way to encourage us to read. Even the Father would come with us and pretend to read a paper whilst sat in the corner.

More disturbingly for me however, the article went on to say that one in 10 people within the UK did not own a book. One in 10 people did not own a book. That’s so shocking it deserves repeating twice.  I suspect Mr F would rather I owned less books, as it is getting close to a choice between my books and space for him, and that is a tricky choice. However to not own even one book I find very sad. The article doesn’t specify what type of book. I assume it means only fiction and therefore doesn’t include things such as cook books (everyone has to own at least one cook book don’t they, even if it’s just a Delia Smith how to boil an egg?) However still that to me is quite a shocking statistic. It makes me want to go and find all these people and give them a book. To be fair I probably do have enough to help out quite a lot.

That’s why I think something like World Book Day is so exciting and is starting a new revolution of readers. If all those children who are buying their first book continue to love reading, then books will be everywhere. Plus it will mean the next generation of parents have something to do whilst they are waiting for the superglue to dry on their child’s Harry Potter costume in 20 years time.

World Book Day

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October 23, 2018 · 6:40 pm

The Office of the Dead

I am a very lucky person to have a job I enjoy. One of the things I really enjoy about my job is the fact that I’m often out of the office. Now of course this is great for a reader like me, hours either sat on trains with a book, or driving round in a car with an audio book blaring are never time wasted. The other big bonus about my job, is I’m often out of the office.

Yes I know that is a repeated sentence, but frankly it is such a bonus it is worth repeating. Offices are funny things. People who have never worked in offices will never understand the day to day resentment that builds up amongst normally sane people. Those that outside the shackles of the 9-5 would normally be nice people inside those hours become like extras on The Walking Dead, out to drink the blood of anyone that dares to get on their nerves. Little things take on huge significance and can take up whole days, first with the discussion around the perceived misdemeanour and then the inevitable policy that will be introduced to attempt to put a stop to the war.

Take for example the phantom porridge bowl leaver in our place. Every day someone has their breakfast in the office. This is of course the first gripe, should it be allowed? Some say yes, some say no, some say this is akin to treason and should be dealt with as such. When finished with the bowl it then gets left in the sink rather than put in the dishwasher. The dishwasher is next to the sink, is it really so difficult to put it in one rather than the other? Of course like all good office workers no one actually works out who the offender is and confronts them. Instead people write big notes which they hang over the sink to be completely ignored by the phantom porridge bowl leaver.

The latest scandal to hit the office however relates to toilet roll. Someone is taking the nice big industrial toilet rolls that I purchase for the office bathrooms, removing them and replacing them with cheap lidl versions. Why would anyone do that? Maybe they have a cat related to mine that likes to ensure all toilet p20180817_045849.jpgaper is in as tiny pieces as possible and preferably laying on the floor. Yet unless they have an industrial sized toilet roll holder in their toilets how are they even going to hang it up? Maybe they are getting ready for Halloween and are going to throw it over houses that don’t have good enough sweets. Yet we are a bunch of middle aged women, not American children! Of course what I should do is calmly call a staff meeting and explain that the toilet roll is for staff use and shouldn’t be replaced with cheap tracing paper. However that would not be proper office etiquette. Oh no, I’m going to write a big sign to stick in the toilets, and if that doesn’t work I think I might write a policy about correct toilet paper usage. If that doesn’t work I’m thinking of installing CCTV in the toilets to catch the offender, surely there is nothing wrong in that?

Luckily for both me and the rest of the staff I am not currently in the office. Therefore I shall stick to reading my book and hope that by the time I’m back in Halloween will be over and the need for industrial size toilet rolls will no longer be a problem. Like I say the big bonus in my job is I’m often out of the office!

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April 29, 2018 · 8:32 am

Wellcome Book Prize Blog Tour

As you know I usually only feature fiction books on acrimereadersblog. I don’t read an awful lot of non-fiction. However there are some exceptions to this, and The Butchering Art was one. Author Lindsey Fitzharris was talking at the York Literature Festival but unfortunately I was unable to attend. So when I was invited to take part in the Blog Tour for the Wellcome Book Prize I jumped at the chance to read a copy of her book.

The Wellcome Book Prize celebrates the best new books that illuminate our encounters with health and medicine. The Butchering Art tells the story of Joseph Lister. In the 19th Century operating theatres were known as ‘gateways to death’ over half the people who had surgery died on the table. Lister was one of the first to believe that germs caused death and that antiseptic could kill them. This was a shocking claim in an era where surgeons didn’t even bother washing their hands before cutting people open! With lots of graphich detail, The Butchering Art is a fascinating tale of Victorian hospitals, where the cleaners were paid more than the surgeons.

The following extract gives a flavour of the book which is available on amazon.

Lister escaped many of the dangerous medical treatments that some of his contemporaries experienced while growing up, because his father believed in vis medicatrix naturae, or “the healing power of nature.” Like many Quakers, Joseph Jackson was a therapeutic nihilist, adhering to the idea that Providence played the most important role in the healing process. He believed that administering foreign substances to the body was unnecessary and sometimes downright life-threatening. In an age when most medicinal concoctions contained highly toxic drugs like heroin, cocaine, and opium, Joseph Jackson’s ideas might not have been too wide of the mark. Because of the household’s dearly held principles, it came as a  surprise to everyone in the family when young Lister announced that he wanted to be a surgeon— a job that involved physically intervening in God’s handiwork. None of his relations, except a distant cousin, were doctors. And surgery, in particular, carried with it a certain social stigma even for those outside the Quaker community. The surgeon was very much viewed as a manual laborer who used his hands to make his living, much like a key cutter or plumber today. Nothing better demonstrated the inferiority of surgeons than their relative poverty. Before 1848, no major hospital had a salaried surgeon on its staff, and most surgeons (with the exception of a notable few) made very little money from their private practices. But the impact a medical career might have on his social and financial standing later in life was far from Lister’s mind when he was a boy. During the summer of 1841, at the age of fourteen, he wrote to his father, who was away attending to the family’s wine business, “When Mamma was out I was by myself and had nothing to do but draw skeletons.” Lister requested a sable brush so that he could “shade another man to shew the rest of the muscles.” He drew and labelled all the bones in the cranium, as well as those of the hands, from both the front and the back. Like his father, young Lister was a proficient artist— a skill that would later help him to document in startling detail his observations made during his medical career.

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March 2, 2017 · 4:56 pm

Children of the revolution

As you all hopefully know, today is World Book Day. In fact it is the 20th anniversary of the day. I can imagine for parent’s the joy of this day is slightly tempered by the need to suddenly create an entire Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory out of an old washing up liquid bottle, an egg box and some sticky back plastic, but to me it’s a really positive day.

Everywhere you go people are talking about books. On the radio, in the papers, even people in the office are showing off pictures of their nephews and nieces dressed as book characters and discussing what they read as a child. Books are such exciting things.  Therefore I was rather surprised to read in the paper that last year 25% of children between eight and 11 had used their £1 book token to buy their first ever book. Don’t get me wrong I think it’s great that the day allowed all those children to buy books. I just can’t imagine not having bought a book by the age of eight.

Admittedly I don’t actually remember buying books when I was eight, that was what parent’s and adults were for. Yet I remember books being everywhere, and I was a child before Harry Potter had even been thought of. We still had Enid Blyton, lots of books about girls with ponies, and of course what is still one of my favourites today, Winnie the Pooh. Even if we weren’t buying books, there were regular family trips to the local library or at one point there was a mobile library which came to us, books on wheels. Libraries were a great way to encourage us to read. Even the Father would come with us and pretend to read a paper whilst sat in the corner.

More disturbingly for me however, the article went on to say that one in 10 people within the UK did not own a book. One in 10 people did not own a book. That’s so shocking it deserves repeating twice.  I suspect Mr F would rather I owned less books, as it is getting close to a choice between my books and space for him, and that is a tricky choice. However to not own even one book I find very sad. The article doesn’t specify what type of book. I assume it means only fiction and therefore doesn’t include things such as cook books (everyone has to own at least one cook book don’t they, even if it’s just a Delia Smith how to boil an egg?) However still that to me is quite a shocking statistic. It makes me want to go and find all these people and give them a book. To be fair I probably do have enough to help out quite a lot.

That’s why I think something like World Book Day is so exciting and is starting a new revolution of readers. If all those children who are buying their first book continue to love reading, then books will be everywhere. Plus it will mean the next generation of parents have something to do whilst they are waiting for the superglue to dry on their child’s Harry Potter costume in 20 years time.

World Book Day

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