Hogging Some Good Books

We love the City Library in Flinders Lane. Two days after it first opened its doors to the public a few years ago, we visited it for the very first time and it was Love at first sight. So we went about signing up for a free membership that very day. We have been visiting it at least once a week ever since. Everyone who lives close to the Melbourne CBD should really pay this library a visit. They stock many new books and recently, M spied that they received a big pile of books from overseas. By borrowing, we got to ‘test drive’ books before deciding if we really needed to buy our own copy. This helps us to save $$$ and living in a pigeon hole like ours, we don’t exactly have the spare space to house every book we want to collect.

The picture shows the books I am currently hogging.

Where Underpants Come From – Joe Bennett
I am currently halfway through this funny book. As revealed earlier in another post, I love reading about Westerners’ experiences in Asia, particularly East Asia. The book is about the author’s journey to find out how underpants like the five-pack that he bought come about. I had wanted to buy a copy when I spotted it at Big W around the time when the Olympics were on last year but chose to stick to our budget instead. Recently in the news, a big company sacked some of their Aussie workers to move more manufacturing offshore. That move angered a lot of people and I suddenly found myself wanting to read this book ASAP. It was no longer available at Big W but luckily the City Library has a copy.

The Creative Family – Amanda Blake Soule
I have borrowed this book 3 times since I discovered it last year. This must be annoying to mums out there who are trying in vain to borrow it. Only bits and pieces are read each time because I am usually in the middle of reading something else. Yeah, I know that is very greedy of me. Anyway, I like the kind of living this author is trying to encourage. It is all very natural, simple and handmade. There are many creative crafts to make throughout the book and terrific activities for the whole family to explore together.

The Literacy Wars – Ilana Snyder
When I first saw this book at Borders last year, the cover design got me thinking about the middle-east for some reason but it has little to do with that part of the world and very much to do with one of my favourite topics in life – Literacy. It is unlikely that I will read this book from cover to cover. 4 or 5 of its 9 chapters seem very interesting.

Your Feeding Questions Answered – Annabel Karmel
This book is so new (Published in 2009) that I think the library forgot to give it a book cover. I might have been the first to borrow it and it probably was one of the books that arrived recently. Again I feel a little guilty for hogging a book like this. The book answers many questions a parent/carer might have about feeding. I haven’t read it from cover to cover but I am glad to learn that many of my answers somewhat matched the author’s in quite a few of the questions I have gone through. So, I may not be a mum of my own children yet, but I am proud to realise that years of working with little poppets have given me quite a bit of hands-on experience.

The City Library is fantastic even though there are a few changes that I don’t like, including the move to remove all junior non-fiction books from the children’s corner and placing them with the adult non fiction books. I think I know why they did it (conspiracy theories?) but if they think that they are successful in eradicating the ‘problem’, they must be blind. Maybe one day the junior non-fiction will be all together again in the children’s corner and I won’t have to go upstairs to search high and low for a junior title among all the books for grown ups. I will blog later on why I also hog books designated for children.

Late last year, probably for nostalgic reason, M and I visited the libraries that we used to go to before the birth of the City Library. Back in those dark times, we were members of the City of Port Philip libraries. The branches we frequented were the one at South Melbourne (aka Emerald Hill) and the one at Albert Park Village. I used to also occasionally go to the mini one in Middle Park. M came away from the libraries very quiet like he was biting his lip to avoid saying something negative. LOL. He didn’t say much until we were well away, probably for fear of hurting the feelings of the libraries/librarians. LOL. Let’s just say that we have been spoilt by what the City Library offers and that has changed our (mostly his) expectations.