The West Mersea Reading Group tell us about themselves. The group, is one of many run by Essex Libraries.
Our group for is for those who have a visual impairment. It meets monthly at West Mersea library. There are currently nine members, all but one of whom joined at its inception at the beginning of 2005. Most of our members have age-related macular degeneration, so audio books are the key format for us. (Average age of members, incidentally, is 90.)
What we’ve been reading
Our reading is very eclectic, and over the last six years we have read sagas, thrillers, biography, history, travel stories and much else besides. Over the past year, we have read some Dick Francis, Dorothy L Sayers, Khaled Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns, Alan Titchmarsh’s autobiography Nobbut a Lad, Andrea Levy’s Small Island, and Sebastian Faulks’ Charlotte Gray_. We welcome being able to read books we might otherwise not have heard of, and relish the diversity of opinion within the group – ’_differing in harmony’, as one member aptly put it. Members have such diverse backgrounds – and such long personal histories – that we are never short of views, suggestions and memories.
Reading is a joy, but also an issue
For people whose sight is compromised there is another dimension. Reading is a joy but also an issue, and ‘how’ one reads is sometimes as important as ‘what’ we read: audio books, boon as they are, cannot fully compensate for the loss of sight. Every member knows what it means to switch to listening to books, often quite recently, from the visual experience that sighted readers take for granted. So we have talked about memory, and how much more trying it can be to go back, or check, or scan, when you are dependent on sound and technology; about preferences for different voices, such as male vs female, dialect and accent, authors reading their own works; and whether the poetry of the written word is lost or enhanced when those words are spoken.
Warmth and support
As much as we enjoy sharing our views, the whole context of our meetings is very important to us. There is a great deal of warmth and mutual support within the group and firm friendships have been made. The Essex Make a Noise in Libraries campaign also suits us very well, with our discussions taking place over coffee and biscuits and often around birthday celebrations, and mince pies at the appropriate season. Each year several of us look forward to March when the Essex Book Festival takes place, when Mersea library too hosts authors giving talks. All this is made possible by the support and kindness of the library staff, who have made us feel fully a part of our local library.
This article also appeared in the NewBooks magazine.
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