This year is National Year of Reading. At Arnold Library we aim to encourage and celebrate reading in all its many forms. Reading is an essential for daily life. It is a fundamental skill that opens doors for everyone – young and old. Reading empowers, inspires and can even change your life! Whether you’re a fan of song lyrics, football journalism, comics, graphic novels, car manuals, cake recipes or William Shakespeare, we’ve got plenty for you to dip into at the Library. Why not pay us a visit? We look forward to seeing you, whatever you read …

What we’ve been doing..

We’ve been busy as usual with our TRY IT courses. On 23rd May (Silver Surfers Day), we ran 12 introductory sessions for people over 50 on how to use computers. We can generally offer around 20 one to one sessions each month. These last an hour and cover PC basics, using the Internet, and sending and receiving email. If you’d like to sign up for a session, please contact us around the beginning of each month to make a booking for the following one.

Our Reading Café continues to open every Wednesday morning from 10.00 a.m. – 12.00 noon. In April, we celebrated Shakespeare’s birthday with a quiz, a guess-the-play from-the-props game and a discussion of his influence on our language and thought.

Everyone told us what a great time they’d had, even the people who thought they hated Shakespeare! Birthday cake was also served – of course. In May we discussed how people choose what to read and looked at some useful websites.

The Arnold Local History Group organised 3 Arnold trail walks in May, and their talks programme continues to be well attended. Rhyme time for babies and toddlers takes over the Library every Tuesday morning with sessions from 10.00 – 10.30 a.m. and 11.00 – 11.30 a.m. But we can always squeeze a few more in especially at the 11.00 a.m. session. If you’d like to introduce your under five(s) to books please join us at our monthly storytimes. We do songs, puppets and lots of laughing too! These are on the first Thursday of the month, 2.00 – 2.30 pm.

What we’ve got planned….

At The Reading Café on Wednesday June 18th 10.30 – 11.30 a.m. Sheelagh Gallagher, our Reading Development Officer, will lead a discussion on the novels and poetry of Thomas Hardy.

Are you tracing your family history? We can offer a basic one-to-one session on using the ancestry.com website. This website includes details from the Census Returns, the United States Federal Census, the Civil Registration Index, and many other records worldwide. Contact Enid Doona on 0115 9202247 to make an appointment.

Friday night Reading Group. This new group meets on the first Friday of each month 7.00 – 8.30 p.m. in the Library meeting Room. They’ve space for one more person. Please contact Jo Birchmore at Arnold Library if you’d like to join them.