Saturday 25 June 2016

Book and a Brew (book subscription box) - initial impressions

A couple of years ago I stumbled upon the idea of 'subscription boxes' whilst shopping for Christmas presents. Whilst the box I gifted wasn't a book subscription (it was a very well received Curry Night subscription box from The Spicery) it did pique my curiosity enough to see what else was out there. I was somewhat amazed to discover that you can buy subscription boxes for all sorts of things including cheese (?), socks (??), scarves (???), geeky gear (????) and, yes, books (hoorah!). 

A number of companies offer book subscription boxes that deliver to/within the UK and each of them offer something slightly different. I'm not going to describe the differences here but a list of some of the companies that offer this type of subscription is given at the end of this blog post in case you'd like to check them out for yourselves. After having a bit of a look around I decided to take the plunge and subscribe to Book and a Brew for 2 reasons:

1) Their choice of books each month seemed quite intriguing - they were titles that I was generally unfamiliar with but that sounded genuinely interesting,
2) I drink a lot of tea!

The subscription costs £12.99 a month and for that I receive a hardback book and a 'drinkable delight' (to quote their website!). Boxes are sent out from the 15th of each month and, sure enough, my first box arrived on the 17th (I think).



Here's my first box. It arrived safe and sound courtesy of the postman. The contents were all well packed - and i loved the fact that they were wrapped neatly in tissue paper which was secured by a cute 'Book and a Brew' sticker.  So, let's talk about the contents. First of all, the book - The Incorruptibles by John Hornor Jacobs. Now, this is definitely not a book I had come across before but I was immediately drawn to it's simple, almost monochrome cover which suggests something of a journey into the unknown. I love the woodcut-style of the cover illustration and the use of the colour gold to highlight the fire, the shooting star and the title. Does its use suggest themes of hope (the star) or danger (the fire)?

Another intriguing little detail is the inclusion of the latin phrase 'in girum imus nocte et consumimur igni' on one of the first few pages before the start of the novel. Not being an expert in latin (I recognised the words 'night' and 'fire') I undertook a quick Google search and discovered that:

a) the phrase is a palindrome - that's to say it's a series of words, numbers or characters which reads the same backward and forward.

b) it means 'we go wandering at night and are consumed by fire'.

This seems to fit really nicely with the cover illustration and left me eager to find out what the book is actually about!

Here's the blurb:

In the contested and unexplored territories at the edge of the Empire, a boat is making its laborious way up stream. Riding along the banks are the mercenaries hired to protect it—from raiders, bandits, and, most of all, the stretchers, elf-like natives who kill any intruders into their territory. The mercenaries know this is dangerous, deadly work. But it is what they do. In the boat the drunk governor of the territories and his sons and daughters make merry. They believe that their status makes them untouchable. They are wrong. And with them is a mysterious, beautiful young woman, who is the key to peace between warring nations and survival for the Empire. When a callow mercenary saves the life of the Governor on an ill-fated hunting party, the two groups are thrown together. For Fisk and Shoe—two tough, honorable mercenaries surrounded by corruption, who know they can always and only rely on each other—their young companion appears to be playing with fire. The nobles have the power, and crossing them is always risky. And although love is a wonderful thing, sometimes the best decision is to walk away. Because no matter how untouchable or deadly you may be, the stretchers have other plans.

After my initial positive thoughts about the book cover and the mysterious little latin phrase i am glad to say that the blurb has only increased my anticipation! I am most definitely looking forward to reading this book!

On to my impressions of the second part of the subscription - the tea!

Included in this month's box is a pack of Teapigs Chilli Chai tea which, according to the information sheet included 'is a twist on traditional chai. Alongside assam tea, cardamom pods, chunks of ginger, cinnamon and vanilla there's added flakes of chilli to give it quite the kick.' I don't know about you but, being a bit of a chai fan, this sounds amazing to me! I also love the simple Teapigs packaging, which includes the image of a fire extinguisher :) as well as the fact that they call their teabags 'tea temples'. Cute! I am also seriously considering trying the pack's suggestion to try one of the 'tea temples' as a latte. Yum yum indeed.

To sum up, I think I can safely say that I am very pleased with my first Book and a Brew box and I am glad that i took the plunge and subscribed.

NB: as promided here is a list of some other companies who offer book subscription boxes to customers in the UK

The Willoughby Book Club

Bookishly
The Beautiful Book Company
Glenogle and Bell
Daunt Books

Mrs B's Reading Year
Persephone Books




Sunday 5 June 2016

Book Reviews - Flawed & Finding Audrey

After my recent trips to local charity shops and the supermarket resulted in a decent-sized book haul for the library, I figured it was probably a good idea to have a sneaky read of one or two of them before adding them to the catalogue ;) 

Here is the latest book haul - seriously, I'm not safe to be left alone near book shelves!


I decided to try Flawed by Cecelia Ahern first.

Here’s the blurb.
Celestine North lives a perfect life. She’s a model daughter and sister, she’s well-liked by her classmates and teachers, and she’s dating the impossibly charming Art Crevan. But then Celestine encounters a situation in which she makes an instinctive decision. She breaks a rule and now faces life-changing repercussions. She could be imprisoned. She could be branded. She could be FLAWED.         

Now, I have a confession to make. I have never read a Cecelia Ahern book before. I know, I know…this is a terrible admission. However, I spotted the ‘Heart-stopping Young Adult debut’ sticker on the cover of Flawed     and figured it might be a good time to start. Turns out, I was right. Whilst Flawed isn’t perfect it is an engaging and pacy read. I was quickly drawn into the dystopian world that Ahern creates and, whilst the central character Celestine can be a little cloying at times I did find myself swept along by the plot which hinges upon a decision of conscience that she makes. The story gives a nod to many issues pertinent today including:
* media ownership – the implications of a single company (or family in the case of Flawed) owning/controlling most of a country’s communications,
* the role of the media in controlling/managing society,
* discrimination and prejudice faced by marginalised groups,
* checks and balances – what do you do when power over the many is held in the hands of the few?
* at what point does fear compromise a human’s nature to be compassionate/to aide another person who is suffering?
* at what point does state and society draw a line between what is legal and what is acceptable behaviour? How and who should ‘police’ this? (The plot is littered with examples - there’s even a not-so-veiled reference to the Ashya King case)

The sequel to Flawed, Perfect, will be published in Spring 2017. I will definitely be picking up a copy.


The second book I chose to read from my haul was Finding Audrey by Sophie Kinsella. 






Here’s the blurb.
Audrey can’t leave the house. She can’t even take off her dark glasses inside the house. Then her brother’s friend Linus stumbles into her life. With his smile and his funny notes, he starts to entice Audrey out again – well, Starbucks is a start. Laugh, dream and hope with Audrey as she learns that even when you feel like you have lost yourself, love can still find you.

 I was drawn to this book primarily because of the subject matter – one girl’s experience of anxiety disorder. Now, this is not a subject to be taken lightly and I wondered how Kinsella, well known for her humorous Shopaholic series, would approach it.

Audrey makes for an engaging narrator: she gives us a hilarious introduction to her family during the first chapter (I won’t spoil anything except to say that it involves her Daily Mail reading mother and her concerns about Audrey’s suspected video-game addicted brother) and her day-to-day struggles with what she refers to as her ‘lizard brain’ which makes even simple interactions with unfamiliar people/situations are very touching. The relationship that Audrey’s family has with each other and with her is both comic and genuinely moving. Audrey’s growing relationship with her brother’s friend, Linus, is touchingly sweet.

I really enjoyed this book and it even made me chuckle out loud in places.


Friday 3 June 2016

Hiatus, but no hernia (fortunately)

Crikey, it's been a while. Years in fact. So, what's new? Well, quite a bit but then not much really.

'What are you on about?' (says just about anybody reading this) Don't worry, I'm getting to it! ('Well get on with it!') 


OK then, where to start? I've changed employers but not in the sense that you might think. The school I previously worked for converted to an Academy, oh, 4 and a bit years ago. At the same time it merged with the other secondary school in our little town thereby becoming a completely new school with a completely different name, uniform and a whole school's worth of staff and students to get to know. So, lots of changes.


For the first couple of years we were based on split sites that were 3 miles apart (*yay*) whilst our lovely brand spanking new campus was under construction.  During the split site years I mainly worked on the site I had been based on for the preceding 6 years and a colleague working on the other. I spent the first 2 years of my Academy experience working 90% with KS3 students as they were based on 'my' site. At first it was a bit odd as I was used to having that balance of KS3 and KS4 students and I missed the contact with older students.

In terms of school library management though, it was a challenge! We had to shuffle our book stock between the sites (remember they were 3 miles apart!) with items appropriate to KS3 students coming to my site and the items more appropriate to older students being shipped over to the other site. As well as this we had to update/merge our library management systems - the KS4 site was still using Alice whereas I had been using Oliver for a few years. Once both the library databases had been upgraded to the latest version of Oliver we then had to decide how to make all of the cataloging consistent (because, believe me, it was a godforsaken mess!!) and then work our way through the records. A lot of this work was done manually. And. It. Took. Bloody. Ages!! But we did it - yay us! And, of course, this was all done whilst we continued to offer all of the usual activities and events that you would expect of a school learning resource centre (LRC) - after school homework club, accessible during breaks and lunches, chess clubs, special events (World Book Day, National Poetry Day etc), supporting teachers with resource requests/classes in the LRC, implementing Accelerated Reader [a whole other story that I'm not going to go into here apart from to say that it added massively to the workload with limited results], library loans/returns/overdues etc etc

You're probably thinking 'whew, that sounds like a lot of work' and you'd not be wrong. However, that wasn't all we had to sort out. Oh no! Remember that we were waiting for our new campus to be built? Well, about 18 months ago we began to prepare in earnest for the 'big move'. Cue a huge amount of sorting, decluttering and boxing up.

To give you an idea of what moving to a new school campus is like imagine trying to organise a house move whilst each room in your house is full of children who need to be kept occupied for about 6 hours a day while most of the furniture, books, displays, pens, pencils and even IT equipment are being gradually removed. Oh, and the children still need to be making progress in their learning while all this is going on around them. It also gets quite tricky to run a library when your books are all packed away.

The long and short of it is that we officially moved into our new build on 10th July 2015 (the students didn't move in until September 2015 - they were given an extra week of summer holiday to allow the staff to get moved in) where the process of unboxing, sorting and shelving started again (yes, I have done an awful lot of this over the past couple of years!). And I must say that my new LRC is lovely - I was involved in the planning process and am glad that many of my suggestions have been incorporated. It is a bright, open and airy space with plenty of seating (both workspaces and comfortable seating). It's also got lots of flexible space so can be reconfigured to fit the needs of different classes, events or activities. I'm also now based right next door to the English department and their office, which is great (I will blog separately about our collaborations on another occasion).

Hope that this post explains a little about my absence from the bloggiverse. I could bang on more (shutting up is not one of my fortes) but I will take a hint and sign off for now. Back soon. Cheers for reading.
July 2015 - my 'I'm in the new LRC' happy face