Library Bookclub

I think having a book club connected to the library is wonderful. Here we are surrounded by books, books for all ages, all tastes with instant access to books we know and love. So Martinborough library with a good  balance between entertainment and information means I can promise you there is a book for you in this library, if not Shirley will source it. 

We have one member who has become very excited by current feminist writing and the books that she was enthusiastic about were ‘The Beauty Suit’,  ‘That F Word’ (possibly not what you are thinking) and ‘Wild power’. I don’t think any subject is banned from discussion, and these books had us recall some personal memories. We moved on to recommending other books in the same genre? We had the librarian check to see what else was available and we remembered one of the very early tomes ‘The Lives and Loves of a She Devil’  Yes it is in the stackroom at Greytown I will be interested to see if it still has the same impact as it did  35 years ago.

Then The Lilac girls proved to be an entertaining read for another member. Inspired by a real World War 2 heroine it tells the story of three diverse women one from the USA, one from Poland and a German whose lives intersect as the world wages war. 

Dark Emu was my choice and this is why I know libraries play such an important role in every community. Here is food for thought as this book confronts Australia’s past and uses the journals and letters from the initial explorers and settlers in their documents as the author researches what they saw in the Aboriginal culture they encountered. 

This is certainly not what I learned from Australian history. To quote “Invaders like to kill the original owners of the soil they intend to plunder, but even better they like to humiliate them. Once that hard work is over their grandsons rewrite the history of the renamed land and paint their grandfathers as benevolent visionaries.

American and European historians have managed to persuade the world that Columbus discovered America and Cook, Australia” In my reading over the years I have found so much of the history  I was taught contains much that I would consider propaganda so to find this also to be true of Australian story should really come as no surprise.

A good library is a serious centre -it does not entertain censorship but offers the stories of the peoples of the world in many and varying ways. In fact many times authors don’t seem to be on the same page! Here was this advertisement in the Dom-post last week re supporting Israel and having read many books on the area I really felt it presented a biased, untrue picture of the reality.

Yeah for libraries! We meet the second Friday of the month at 10am and everyone is welcome.

Glenys Hansen