EVERY GIRL - EVERY DAY 20th March 2020 Book Shelves Emptied! While panicked shoppers were emptying supermarket shelves, our Croydon High pupils made a real dent in the Learning Resource Centre bookshelves on Thursday. 386 books were borrowed in a single day! C. S. Lewis wrote that “we read to know we are not alone”; salient words as we face difficult times ahead. Gavin Extence picks up on this theme in his humorous bier-sweet novel The Universe versus Alex Woods. Alex suffers from epilepsy (as a result of being struck on the head as a child by a 2.3kg meteorite!) and, as a teenager, has to suffer a year of virtual isolation. He comments:
Transcript
E V E RY G I R L - E V E RY DAY
20th March 2020
Book Shelves Emptied!
While panicked shoppers were emptying supermarket shelves, our Croydon High pupils made a
real dent in the Learning Resource Centre bookshelves on Thursday. 386 books were borrowed in
a single day!
C. S. Lewis wrote that “we read to know we are not alone”; salient words as we face difficult
times ahead. Gavin Extence picks up on this theme in his humorous bitter-sweet novel The
Universe versus Alex Woods. Alex suffers from epilepsy (as a result of being struck on the head as a child
by a 2.3kg meteorite!) and, as a teenager, has to suffer a year of virtual isolation. He comments:
E V E RY G I R L - E V E RY DAY
20th March 2020
“The period of my confinement was also the period in which I
developed my insatiable appetite for reading. Reading, it turned
out, was one of the only things I could do… When I look back at
the year I spent in the box room, I think these were the books
that stopped me from feeling sorry for myself and got me to
thinking that, on the whole, my life wasn’t so terrible. When I
read these books, I no longer felt like I was confined to a very
tiny world…. my brain, with a little help from other people’s
brains, could take me to some pretty interesting places, and
create all kinds of wonderful things.”
Perhaps we can take a leaf out of Extence’s novel and use this
time of isolation to connect with other voices, people, and worlds
