When Did We Stop Needing the Local Library?

 I was thinking about libraries the other day.

Not in any particularly profound way. I walked past one, noticed the opening hours on the door and thought, Is that all they're open now?

And then I started remembering what libraries used to be like.

When I was younger, going to the library was an event. You didn't pop in because you had ten minutes to spare. You went armed with a library card and the firm intention of coming home with as many books as you were physically allowed to borrow.

There was something rather wonderful about it.

The slightly musty smell. The plastic covers on the books. The little thump as the librarian stamped the return date. Wandering along shelves without having the faintest idea what you wanted until a cover caught your eye.

And, of course, that terrible moment when somebody else had borrowed the next book in the series.

There was no clicking a button and having it arrive tomorrow.

You waited.

Somehow, we survived.

I know libraries still exist. There are thousands of branches across the country, and millions of people still use them. But they are under enormous pressure. According to Libraries Connected, real-terms local authority spending on public libraries fell by 47% between 2009–10 and 2022–23, while the UK has also seen a net loss of council-run static libraries since 2016.

And I think we've become strangely accepting of that.

A library reduces its hours.

Then it loses a librarian.

Then perhaps it's only open three days a week.

Eventually somebody announces that hardly anyone is using it anymore.

Well... yes.

It's rather difficult to use somewhere that's permanently shut when you want to go.

The strange thing is that we haven't actually stopped reading.

We buy books online. We download them onto Kindles. We listen to audiobooks while walking the dog. We watch people on TikTok enthusiastically displaying shelves containing more books than some small branches probably have left.

Books haven't disappeared.

But perhaps our relationship with them has changed.

I love my Kindle. I'm certainly not going to pretend otherwise. Being able to finish a book at eleven o'clock at night and immediately buy the sequel is one of civilisation's greater achievements.

But a Kindle can't quite replace wandering through shelves.

Because in a library you find the book you weren't looking for.

You go in for a crime novel and somehow come home with a biography, a gardening book and a slightly battered novel written in 1987 because the title made you laugh.

No algorithm decided you'd like them.

You just found them.

And libraries aren't only about borrowing books anyway.

They're one of the few places left where you can simply be without anybody expecting you to buy something.

Children discover books there. People use computers because they don't have one at home. Someone sits quietly and reads the newspaper. Someone else asks a librarian for help with something online. There are reading groups, children's activities and people who perhaps haven't spoken to another person all day.

That community role hasn't vanished. Libraries Connected says today's libraries support everything from reading and digital skills to wellbeing and social connection, even while services continue to face financial pressure.

And perhaps that's what bothers me most about losing them.

Once a library has gone, I don't think you can easily recreate what was there.

You can download a book.

You can order one online.

You can even have it delivered to your door before you've finished the one you're currently reading.

But you can't download a place.

A place where a child can choose ten books even if their parents couldn't afford to buy one.

A place where nobody minds if you spend an hour browsing and leave without spending a penny.

A place where books belong to everybody.

Maybe we didn't stop needing local libraries at all.

Maybe we just stopped noticing how much we needed them.

Until they started disappearing.

Book Review: The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid

  

★★★★★ - Five Stars

I bought this because everybody seemed to be talking about it.

Bookshops had it piled on tables. It kept appearing online. People were saying it had broken their hearts. Other people were saying it was completely overhyped.

Obviously, I had to find out which camp I belonged to.

Well.

Consider my heart thoroughly broken.

The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo introduces us to Evelyn Hugo, an ageing Hollywood legend who has spent decades guarding the truth about her life. Now she has decided to tell everything, and for reasons nobody understands, she wants virtually unknown journalist Monique Grant to write her story.

And when Evelyn says everything, she really does mean everything.

Her rise from an ordinary girl to one of Hollywood's biggest stars is told through the story of her seven marriages. Some were about love. Some were useful. Some were mistakes. And some are considerably more complicated than they first appear.

I loved Evelyn.

I also disliked Evelyn.

Occasionally I wanted to shake Evelyn.

That's probably why she worked so well for me.

Taylor Jenkins Reid hasn't tried to make her heroine particularly likeable. Evelyn can be ruthless, manipulative, selfish and frighteningly pragmatic when she wants something. She understands very early that Hollywood is a game and decides that if everybody else is going to play it, she intends to win.

But there is also vulnerability beneath all that armour.

The further I got into her story, the more I understood the difference between the woman Evelyn actually is and the woman she has spent decades allowing the public to see. The glamorous photographs, the husbands, the headlines and the carefully manufactured scandals hide an entirely different life.

And that's where this book got me.

I went into it expecting Hollywood gossip and seven disastrous marriages. I certainly got plenty of scandal, but the real story is about love, identity, ambition, friendship and the price people sometimes pay for living the life the world expects of them.

The Old Hollywood setting is delicious. There are film sets, premieres, fabulous dresses, newspaper scandals and marriages that seem to have been arranged with one eye firmly fixed on tomorrow's headlines. It has that wonderfully gossipy feeling of being allowed behind a door that was supposed to remain firmly closed.

I also liked the way the seven husbands give the book its structure. Every marriage represents a different stage of Evelyn's life, so instead of feeling repetitive, each one reveals another piece of the woman she eventually becomes.

Monique's sections didn't grab me quite as much at first. Whenever the story returned to the present day, I found myself impatient to get back to Evelyn. I don't think that's unusual — Evelyn is such a huge personality that almost anybody standing beside her is going to struggle for attention. Some reader reviews make a similar criticism of Monique's storyline, while others feel her role becomes more important as the novel progresses.

By the end, I understood why she was there.

And no, I'm not telling you.

There were a couple of moments when I guessed where the story might be heading, but it didn't spoil anything for me. This isn't really a book that depends upon a shocking twist. I cared far more about how Evelyn had reached this point and what all those choices had cost her.

The writing is very accessible, which I suspect is another reason the book has become so enormously popular. You can absolutely fly through it. More than four million ratings on Goodreads currently average around 4.39 stars, although there are also plenty of readers who feel the novel doesn't quite live up to the extraordinary hype surrounding it.

I'm firmly with the people who loved it.

Evelyn Hugo is messy, glamorous, infuriating, clever, selfish, brave and wonderfully human.

And somewhere along the way, I completely forgot that she wasn't real.

That's probably the biggest compliment I can give this book.

Book Review: The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman

 

 ★★★★☆ - Four Stars

I was ridiculously late to The Thursday Murder Club.

It seemed as though everyone had read it before I finally picked it up, and by then I had heard so much about Elizabeth, Joyce, Ibrahim and Ron that I half expected them to be waiting impatiently for me at Coopers Chase.

The premise is brilliant. Four friends in a retirement village meet every Thursday to look through old murder cases and see whether they can work out what really happened. It is mostly an intellectual exercise until an actual murder occurs rather too close to home, at which point the Thursday Murder Club suddenly has a real investigation to get its teeth into.

I expected a cosy murder mystery.

What I hadn't expected was to become so fond of everyone.

Joyce was probably my favourite. Her diary entries are wonderful because she can wander from murder to cake without apparently seeing anything strange about it. There is something delightfully ordinary about her, and yet she's much more observant than people give her credit for.

Elizabeth, meanwhile, is anything but ordinary. She clearly has quite a history behind her, knows how to get information when she wants it and seems to regard rules as things that apply mainly to other people. Ibrahim is thoughtful and methodical, while Ron is considerably more likely to charge straight into a situation and worry about the consequences afterwards.

Together they are tremendous fun.

One of the things I liked most was that Osman doesn't treat his older characters as sweet little pensioners who have somehow stumbled into solving a crime. They are intelligent, complicated people with decades of experience behind them. They have careers, marriages, mistakes, secrets, grief and friendships in their pasts. That emphasis on character, humour and warmth alongside the mystery is something that comes up repeatedly in responses to the novel.

And they are perfectly capable of running rings around considerably younger people.

The mystery itself kept me guessing, although I did occasionally think there was a little too much going on. There are plenty of characters to remember, several threads to follow and moments when I had to stop and remind myself who somebody was. Judging by the range of reader reactions, I'm certainly not alone in finding the book a little busier than expected, although the characters and humour are what seem to win most readers over.

For me, they did too.

What really surprised me was the sadness running quietly underneath all the fun. Coopers Chase is full of people approaching the later years of their lives, and Osman doesn't pretend otherwise. There are moments concerning ageing, loss, illness and loving someone when time is no longer something you can take for granted.

It gives the book considerably more heart than I was expecting.

I laughed quite a lot, became far too invested in the residents' lives and reached the final pages feeling rather pleased that this wasn't a standalone novel.

Is it the most fiendishly complicated murder mystery I've ever read? Probably not.

Did I thoroughly enjoy spending time with these four interfering amateur detectives?

Absolutely.

And if I ever end up living in a retirement village, I now have very specific requirements concerning its extracurricular activities.