Spotlight 24. Senses

The soft ripple of pages. Beautiful illustrations. A perfectly cast audiobook narrator.

 

Today’s post explores how reading appeals to our different senses. While it may be impossible to capture bibliosmia (a.k.a. the aroma of old books!) in a blog, there are many ways to discover a great read through sound, sight, and touch.

#BookQuizFriday: Five Senses in Fiction

It's time for another Friday book quiz! This week we’ve set you some questions that tie in with today's sensory theme. Here’s a little taster to get you started:

What is the name of the orphaned anti-hero with an extraordinary sense of smell in Patrick Süskind’s novel Perfume: The Story of a Murderer?

How does Julia Donaldson’s classic picture book describe the texture of the Gruffalo’s knees? Fluffy? Knobbly? Or leathery?

You can find the full quiz on our Facebook and Twitter pages. The answers will be revealed next Friday.

Listen to Something Great from our eLibrary

Whether you prefer novels, biography, poetry, or non-fiction, our eLibrary has plenty of talking books to enjoy, including recent bestsellers and award-winning recordings like The Lost Words.

To join the library and access all these titles and more for free, visit our website.

Then, check out this brilliant Guardian feature on what it’s like to narrate an audiobook. From learning to read in a dead language to tackling tricky words ("glomerulonephritis" doesn't exactly roll off the tongue), it’s clearly even harder than it sounds.

Hi VIS Fortnight: Celebrating the Word in All its Formats

It’s currently Hi VIS Fortnight, where we highlight the library services available for blind and partially sighted readers.

Along with offering a wide choice of audiobooks, the eLibrary's RBdigital App features several options for adjusting how eBooks and magazines display on your smartphone or tablet screen.

When reading an eBook in the App, you can adjust font, text size, and the background colour and contrast using the Text Settings logo at the top of the screen. When reading magazines, you can switch to a Text view of individual articles and adjust text size and background colour using the settings at the bottom of the screen.

There are also free national services offering books in a range of formats.

The RNIB Library has a continually growing collection of over 60,000 books. Books are available in audio, Braille, and giant print. Click here to find out more.

The RNIB also has a fantastic weekly podcast, Read On, which features book news, reviews, readings, and author interviews. You can listen to previous shows here, and catch new episodes each Friday at 1pm.

Getting Hands-On with Books and Story-Boards

Pop-up stories, lift-the-flap books, touch-and-feel board books … discovering stories can be a very tactile experience.

Fitting in with the theme of touch, our Children’s Team has been creating some “sensory boards”.

Here’s a video that shows how to make a sensory board with lots of different textures and interactive objects to help young children develop their fine motor skills. You could even use the different panels to create a “story-board”.

Interactive books, such as pop-up books, haven’t only been made for young audiences. The earliest known example, created by a 13th Century monk, was actually used to help calculate the dates of Christian holidays.

Based on an exhibition showcasing 500 years of pop-up books, this video highlights some of the history and impressive feats of paper engineering behind books that “spring to life”.

Reading Pictures

Reading graphic novels involves developing a very different type of “visual literacy”: a skill which can introduce us to a whole range of exciting and artistically stunning books.

In this BookTrust article, graphic novelist Hannah Berry talks about (re)learning to read comics.

Our eLibrary now features more than 1000 graphic novels, including titles for adults and children.

 

We have a wide selection of Marvel comics, from classic Spider-Man and Avengers titles to the brilliant recent reboots of Ms. Marvel and Squirrel Girl. But there’s so much more to graphic novels than superheroes.

Here are a few of our titles for older readers.

If you’ve never read a graphic novel before or want to try something new, why not take a look at March, activist John Lewis’s award-winning autobiographical trilogy about the Civil Rights Movement.

There are also visual retellings of classic novels like Sense and Sensibility.

Or how about checking out Bryan Talbot’s Grandville, a lavishly illustrated steampunk thriller featuring a badger detective who’s about as far away from the cute talking animals of Peter Rabbit as you can imagine.

All of our graphic novels are available here.

Sensational Writing Workshops

Claire from Central Library has brought her popular series of creative writing events online. She is now running free writing workshops via Zoom.

On Saturday 13 June there will be a session themed around Synaesthesia.

Details of all forthcoming online events will appear on this page. Follow us on Eventbrite to hear about future workshops as soon as tickets become available.

Lastly, a Story to Lull You to Sleep

Novelist A.L. Kennedy's Going, going, gone is one of a series of "sound stories" produced for the Guardian Books podcast, designed to help listeners drift off to sleep.

Transporting you through the seasons and a soundscape featuring rolling tides and purring cats, this story makes for soothing and meditative evening listening.

Listen to Going, going, gone here.