August’s Monthly Stories and Poems

Summer can be a time to reset, giving ourselves pause before life picks up pace again in the later months of the year. August’s theme for Monthly Stories and Poems reflects this mode of being: we are thinking about ways in which we can experience renewal and be recalled to life.

We couldn’t let the launch of the new Open Air Cinema season at The Reader’s home at the Mansion House at Calderstones pass by unheralded! This month’s selections include extracts from two well-loved classic novels, Little Women and Sense of Sensibility. 

This month’s stories and extracts provide us with snapshots into the lives of different people, facing different challenges. There comes the sudden crisis of illness and the ways in which quiet support and sympathy can be a tonic, in more ways than one. For others, a feeling of being ‘stuck in a rut’ and longing for new experiences, along with drastic transformation of life and its routines, lead in their own ways to deeper reflection and unexpected wonder.

August’s stories and extracts are:

Anxiety and hope (extract from Sense and Sensibility) by Jane Austen

‘Hold on to me’ (extract from Little Women) by Louisa May Alcott

Asters and Goldenrod (extract from Braiding Sweetgrass) by Robin Wall Kimmerer

The Loss by Kate Roberts (translated by Walter Dowding)

Bedtime Story (extract from Good To A Fault) by Marina Endicott

As Clare, The Reader’s Head of Shared Reading Practice reflects: ‘Group members often talk about Shared Reading in terms of a feeling of coming back to life’, and August’s poetry choices open up feelings of renewal in a number of different ways. What does beginning again look like? Does it come with each dawn of a new day, or at times that feel more unexpected? This month’s poems cover the breadth of brand new life through to chances at rebirth that come to us later down the line, and consider whether we always make the most of these opportunities.

A Return by Elizabeth Jennings

Morning Poem by Mary Oliver

The Salutation by Thomas Traherne

Born Yesterday by Philip Larkin

Eurydice by H.D.

If you're a Reader Leader head to the Online Community Hub to download this month's selection.