Fear not, despite the title I am not going to channel my inner Keats and force a poem on anyone.  None of us deserve that.

I am, however, going to share my appreciation of my local library, and I realise that a more correct literary title would be a “Paeon of Praise” but it´s autumn (well it was when I first thought about this post) and all our recent mists have made me think of Keats and Odes, though truthfully autumn in the Falklands has little in common with the “mellow fruitfulness” of Keats’ England.

One of the jewels of life in Stanley is the Christie Community Library – perched on a hill just to the west of the city centre, sharing a building with Falkland College.  It has the advantage of being modern, having a great view across the harbour and beingwell decorated and laid out.  It has an excellent selection of modern fiction for all ages, reference books and a good collection of Falkland Islands history.  It’s cheering to see a community invested in the importance of its library and ensuing that it has the funds to keep its collection fresh and importantly that it is free to use and works hard to support the whole community.

The librarians are passionate about encouraging pleasure in reading and go to great lengths to ensure that everyone benefits, helping their readers choose books and thinking up monthly themes and annual challenges that nudge people to explore authors they don’t normally read.  

The library runs many community activities from those for babies and their parents to sessions for older residents.  My particular favourite is Book Chatter – a not book group!  Book groups generally all read the same book and then talk about it. This is a challenge for us in finding enough copies of the same book to read – the library tends to only have 1 copy of anything at a time and there is no book shop in Stanley.  The solution to this is to meet once a month and talk about whatever we’ve read.  This is rather wonderful, as it introduces us to new authors, genres and themes and it is a pleasure to spend an hour a month with others who love reading.

The library works really well for those who can travel into Stanley but what about more remote readers?  Never fear, I recently learned that the librarians send book parcels to regular Camp readers with FIGAS.  More surprisingly they explained that generally they have to choose the books for these readers, as the library’s book collection is not yet available online, so each arriving parcel is full of mystery books!  Yet another example of resourcefulness at its best in the Falklands.