Central Library

A few weeks ago me & a few flickr friends spent some time at Manchester's Central Library, photographing the building before it closes for major renovations. Due to obvious changes that will occur, the library have decided to relax the rules on photography, so as long as we didn't photography people's faces etc (well unless we asked first) we could go mad and also post them to the Get Wisdom flickr group.
I will confess, it was my first time back in the building since I was at university and it was actually a lot more impressive than I recall. Designed by architect E. Vincent Harris and built in 1934 the 'heart of the library' The Great Hall (previously known as a the Reading Room) is probably the most recognized architecturally for it's large glass dome in the roof.
Outside this room is an outer corridor of beautiful arches
and more stacks of books,along with seemingly endless rows of tiny drawers containing microfilm cards etc.. which seemed to hold the group attention for a quite while, yielding some varied results.

Most of the library is now closed, with the ground floor general readers library closing 18th June and the Theatre & Box office closing 4th July with the newly renovated library planned to reopen in 2013 for more info check the Manchester Libraries website

The Kite Runner

I've just finished reading The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini, such a beautifully written book, I really don't think I could do it justice. The basic premise of the book can be found in the link above. I don't think I've ever been so torn between not wanting to know what comes next and being unable to put a book down, hoping that everything will turn out ok but knowing that my hope for a happy ending is pretty futile and the story is going to have a lot more emotional turmoil, it actually had me holding back the tears in several parts. Not sure whether I will be able to sit through the film when it comes out, but I will definitely be looking out for Hosseini's next book A Thousand Splendid Suns on my next trip into Manchester. But for tonight, my next book is Reading Lolita In Tehran which is a memoir by Azar Nafisi.