A week after Matthew's birthday and the F1 game is still going strong. He has signed for Force India and there was huge excitement when he reached the dizzy heights of 19th on one of the qualifying sessions but it's been a week of 10 grid place penalties, disqualifications and a consistent 24th.
It's also been a succession of Christmas dinners with my Book Club's meal kicking off the proceedings - a decent helping of mussels and french fries at the Beehive, followed by a traditional roast the next day at my son's school(in my role as parent governor) and rounded off with fishcakes and salad for our Team meal out at the cuckoo. I'm going to go on a strict diet next week ready for Christmas.
We were supposed to have talked about Precious Bane for our Bookclub but only 2 people had managed to finish the book with not many good things to say. I read the first paragraph and decided that life was too short to decipher the Shropshire accent and left it. Definitely wins the award for the most unpopular book we've had, beating Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian which previously held this dubious record.
Workwise it's been a week dominated by New Books, RNIB's bimonthly magazine advertising the new titles in the library. Everyone has a section which they are responsible for - from running a report for their format for the last 2 months and then editing it to a set format. This isn't just for consistency and to make it professional but also to take into account that the magazine is produced in different formats. For example, to make the daisy version navigatable, we have to set the text out using different formats.
My role is to pull all the sections together and proof read it across the formats including checking the formatting, consistency and adding missing information. It's been a tighter deadline than usual so have found that a copy seems to be constantly at my side.
The calls for extra Christmas books still keep coming in. I've also had a string of wholesale changes to reader's lists. I'm guessing that as people begin to get more dependent on their books over the winter months, they are becoming more discerning on what they read. It can be a lengthy process, particularly if they're really specific in their taste and worse still, they've read everything we have to offer. The calls for Claire Tomalin's biography keep coming in, definitely need to select this next time around though there is a dilemma that Audiogo may pick this up and we may have to wait for this to come out as an Import.
We've managed to acquire noticeboard space in a prime spot near the canteen for a few months. This has given us a good and easy opportunity to promote the Reader Services Team. Last month, we had new films/TV drama tie-in's to books where we had some good titles available in alternative format including The Slap, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and The Help.
Last week we decided on books with a Christmas theme, my 2 books were Tolkien's Letters to Santa and Fannie Flagg's - A Redbird Christmas. We're taking it in turns to do the final display, my colleague went to town with loads of Christmas images to give the display a Christmassy finishing touch. It's my turn next month and we're talking about doing a display advertising our Bookclub as we're getting short of participants. I'm already getting my thoughts together.
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