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If you're finding reading difficult, school can be particularly daunting. There always seems to be so many things to read! This is where our Sound Learning service comes in. We record educational audiobooks from ages 7 and up so that at least getting through the reading doesn't have to be difficult. We've collected some of the best back to school audiobooks in our library, so get a head start on listening!
August 23, 2017
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Literature professor Simon John James and physicist Richard Bower were both involved in the curating the exhibition, Time Machines – the past, the future, and how stories take us there. Their conversations quickly revealed to them the many, wildly various, meanings of “time travel”. Here, they discuss how time travelling in literary and scientific terms might, one day, coincide.
July 4, 2017
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Despite the growing technological panic at the cusp of the twenty-first century, my parents only owned one CD player. It was too big to move from the sitting room, so the audiobook was bought for me as six cassette tapes to listen to in my bedroom. At nine years old, I had already amassed an impressive collection of audiobooks on cassette - I've always struggled to fall asleep and need to be tricked into unconsciousness by distraction from overthinking and worrying. I had Roald Dahl’s Fantastic Mr Fox and The Giraffe, The Pelly and Me memorised, and had been forced to give up my Thomas the Tank Engine cassette to my sister, who was, in fairness, deserving; she's younger than me and suffers from the same problem sleeping.
June 26, 2017
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It sounds like a cliché, but I've always loved to read. My journey into personhood was guided less by those around me and more by the worlds I inhabited and the people I met on my fictional travels. I wanted to be Matilda for ages. I genuinely thought that if I read more books my brain would become so advanced I’d be able to close my curtains without leaving my bed.
June 23, 2017
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When I was thirteen and wishing that Orlando Bloom would read me the phonebook (it was 2003, that’s the only excuse I have), I could never have dreamt that there would be so many books read by celebrities to choose from.
June 20, 2017
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It can always be difficult to pick your next title to listen to. Whether you've just come off the back of listening to a book you loved or one that you're not sure was quite right for you, or if you've never listened to an audiobook before, how do you pick from the vast range of books out there?
June 5, 2017
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When dealing with the otherness of disability, the Victorians in their shame built huge out-of-sight asylums, and their legacy of “them” and “us” continues to this day. Two hundred years later, technologies offer us an alternative view. The digital age is shattering barriers, and what used to the norm is now being challenged.
May 22, 2017
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161 years ago today L. Frank Baum, best known as the author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, was born. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was the best-selling children’s book for two years after its initial publication in 1900. But it was just one of the 55 novels, four ‘lost works’, 83 stories and 200 poems that Baum wrote. So for his birthday, we thought we delve a little into the varied and fascinating life of Lyman Frank Baum.
May 15, 2017
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It started when an American academic noticed how frequently the acknowledgements sections of weighty academic tomes featured a male author thanking his nameless wife for typing.
May 2, 2017
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This week is MS Awareness Week, and the Multiple Sclerosis Trust are celebrating specialist MS nurses and the work they do, as well as making it a priority that everyone living with MS has access to a specialist nurse.
April 25, 2017
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