Love Your Library

A magical time of year

Term Three is a magical time as we celebrate Book Week. The theme this year is “Reading is Magic” and we will be casting a spell over our St George’s community, luring staff and students into the library so they may be transformed by reading.

Our initial focus this term is NAIDOC Week, which we have celebrated with a display of some of the many books we have in our collection authored by Indigenous writers. We also have a detailed LibGuide with resources for middle and upper school students. The Library Homepage is accessible via SEQTA at https://stgeorgesgrammarperth.softlinkhosting.com.au/oliver/home/news From the Library Homepage students can access ABC Education, LibGuides and ClickView. All these sites have resources to celebrate NAIDOC WEEK. In addition to this Mrs Sykiotis has curated resources for English teachers to use for Wider Reading.

In Week 2 all the Library co-curricular activities will recommence. Puzzle Club on Tuesday, Philosophy Club on Wednesday and Homework Club on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, all run from 3.40 to 4.40pm. Students enrolled in these activities need to remain in the Library until 4.40pm.

The holidays provided time for some intense reading. At the beginning of the holidays I was reading Butter, by Asako Yuzuki. This was a gentle, slow read about the complex nature of hunger. Once finished, I began Ian McGuire’s The North Water. I was enticed by the cover with its reviews by Colm Toibin and Hilary Mantel. Set on a nineteenth century whaling vessel in the Arctic, the novel is a quite literally chilling account of the worst of human nature. It reminded me of a freezer version of Heart of Darkness, with far more explicit explorations of how vile human behaviour can be once free of civilisation. 

It was with some relief I started Gail Jones’ new novel, One Another. By coincidence, this novel works directly with Joseph Conrad whom the protagonist is researching for her PhD. I have always loved novels set in the academic world; A. S. Byatt’s novel Possession is probably my absolute favourite book. Jones’s novel doesn’t have the richness of Byatt’s but does share an exploration of the destructive impact of misogyny on women’s intellectual endeavours. For a shift in pace I am currently reading Brotherless Night, by V. V. Ganeshananthan. The setting, Sri Lanka’s civil war, is one that I am ignorant about. I am finding this novel utterly fascinating, and I want to learn much more about this context. Beyond this, Ganeshananthan’s writing is quite wonderful. All these novels will find new homes in the senior fiction section of our library where they can bring magic to the lives of others.

Dr Annette Pedersen

Library Coordinator