A day in the life of GIR Wirral #1
Get Into Reading Wirral is the largest of our Get Into Reading Projects: there are over 100 groups and one-one-sessions running each week, reaching over 600 people across the borough - from 3 years old, to 93 years old!
Over the next few weeks, we will be posting short blogs from GIR Wirral staff to give you a picture of this huge projects which runs groups in libraries, care homes, community centres, mental health day centres, detox centres, and schools.
To start us off, project worker Marianne Kelly offers us an insight into her GIR group at The Lauries Community Centre in Birkenhead.
Time for Me has been running at The Lauries for a couple of years now. This week we started A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens! My group members were relieved to hear me admit that for many years I had picked up this book (which has now become one of my favourites) and never managed to get past the first chapter! Many others in the group had done exactly the same. But on Wednesday we did get past that very difficult first chapter and left the session filled with excitement and anticipation for the next installment. Much time was spent trying to answer the many questions that the mysterious opening of the novel raises. It was great to have a brand new member starting with us as well. When I spoke to her after the session she said she had all of Dickens's novels at home but had never read any of them:
'I found it so much easier reading it with people as everyone works it out together and the bits I don't understand are explained, I'll definitely be back next week.
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1 thought on “A day in the life of GIR Wirral #1”
Glad to hear the beginning went well, Marianne – best of luck with the long way to go! 😉
Ha, yes – ‘the greatest novel I never read’ is a good subject. We have some friends round the corner who have a copy of ‘A Tale of Two Cities’ – a solitary classic in the house, and the story’s always the same; it’s been picked up a number of times but never read. I have suggested that they could try other books – it’s not the only famous book that can be left on the shelf. For my part, there are too many to mention. I must admit to a slight variation on the well-trodden ground of owning ‘Ulysses’ without having read it… I have in the past said ‘oh, well, I gave up on ‘Finnegan’s Wake” – allowing the implication that I’d managed to read up to and including ‘Ulysses’ to hang in the air. Clever, eh?
Come out of the woodwork… we’ve all done it!