Harborne Library

Julia Donaldson supporting libraries after the news that she is to become Dame Julia Donaldson ❤️

We are incredibly proud to announce that Julia Donaldson has been recognised in The King's Birthday Honours list! 🏅📚

Julia Donaldson has been honoured with a Damehood (DBE) to celebrate her extraordinary career. Julia has written some of the world’s best-loved children’s books including Room on the Broom, Gozzle, and of course The Gruffalo. On the 10th of September, Julia will publish the much-awaited Gruffalo Granny with illustrator Axel Scheffler, partnering with nine literacy and disability charities to bring the wonderful new story to as many children and families as possible in The National Year of Reading. 👑✨

Julia Donaldson said: "Receiving this honour has been a very happy surprise. It's really gratifying to have children's books recognised in this way. I'm so grateful for all the enthusiastic support I've had during my career from people in the book world - those in the very many libraries, schools and bookshops I've visited over the years, my wonderful illustrators, the publishers and literacy charities I've been involved with, and of course my readers. Going back further, perhaps my biggest debt of all is to the library which was in walking distance of my childhood home and the librarian who helped me discover the books and authors that I came to love. Without that place and person I probably would never have become a children's writer - let alone a Dame! So I'm making a plea to the government for more libraries and more librarians in our communities and schools, so that the current generation of children can enjoy all the benefits that reading brings."

Wow, this is a tricky one but I think we'll stick with Librarian as there are so many other wonder aspects to the job 👍 How about you?

Congratulations to Dame Malorie Blackman and Dame Julia Donaldson, so well deserved!

Huge congratulations to Dame Malorie Blackman and Dame Julia Donaldson! 👏

We are completely delighted to see these two former Waterstones being recognised in the King's Birthday Honours this year.

They have both done so much - and continue to do so much - to help every child discover a love of reading, and we are so grateful for their ongoing support of BookTrust.

We couldn't be happier to see that being celebrated at the highest level! ✨

Read more books! ❤️

We're looking forward to the Summer Reading Challenge and this year the theme is 'Read to the Beat'. But how many previous challenges do you remember? The Summer Reading Challenge started in 1999 with the Reading Safari and has continued to be popular with our younger readers. Did you or your children take part in any of the others over the last 27 years? Let us know which was your favourite!

Have you read Ulysses? What did you think?

James Joyce’s Ulysses is not merely a novel; it is a vast ocean of human consciousness. Published in 1922, it takes place during a single ordinary day in Dublin—June 16, 1904—but inside that day Joyce discovers an entire universe. Streets, pubs, bedrooms, offices, memories, desires, jokes, regrets, advertisements, songs, and prayers all become part of one immense human symphony. What seems simple on the surface—the wandering of Leopold Bloom, Stephen Dedalus, and Molly Bloom—slowly becomes a modern epic of the human mind itself.

The greatness of Ulysses lies in the way it transforms ordinary life into something heroic. Joyce deliberately echoes Homer’s Odyssey, but his hero is not a warrior sailing through mythical seas; he is Leopold Bloom, a gentle, wounded, intelligent man walking through Dublin while carrying grief, loneliness, tenderness, and quiet dignity within him. In Bloom, Joyce gives us a new kind of hero: not grand, not powerful, not victorious in the traditional sense, but deeply human. His compassion becomes his strength, and his endurance becomes his epic journey.

Joyce’s style is dazzling, difficult, playful, and revolutionary. He breaks the usual form of the novel and enters the private movement of thought itself. In Ulysses, the mind does not speak in neat sentences; it drifts, remembers, interrupts itself, jokes, desires, fears, and returns again to old wounds. This is why the book can feel challenging, even intimidating, but also strangely intimate. Joyce wanted to show life as it actually passes through us—not as polished storytelling, but as a flood of impressions, language, sensation, and memory.

At its heart, Ulysses is a book about being alive in all its confusion and beauty. It is about fathers and sons, husbands and wives, exile and belonging, the body and the soul, guilt and forgiveness, death and desire. Joyce turns one day in Dublin into a mirror of all human experience. The novel asks us to look closely at the ordinary and discover that nothing ordinary is truly small. Perhaps that is the secret power of Ulysses: it teaches us that every human life, even in its most private and imperfect moments, contains the material of an epic

GO ALL IN! We're still celebrating the National Year of Reading at Harborne Library.

Are you off on holiday soon? Why not travel with a good read from this month's display!