On Tuesday January 31st, the Malden Reads Committee did a presentation at the Senior Center to discuss their upcoming plans for their seventh season. One plan that was discuss was the this year’s book selection titled A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman.
Anne D’Urso-Rose an associate director at MATV and a part of the Malden Reads team said that they’re planning on doing the same events from last year such as a community stargazing on Waitt’s Mountain and a Malden Reads Family Night at Boda Borg. Since the major theme of this this year’s book is getting to know your neighbors, she said they are “looking forward to bringing people together, [who may not necessarily know each other], for those events.”
This year, the team is partnering up with Malden Arts for the “Free Little Libraries” project, where they will create hand-crafted little libraries that people can “adopt”and place them near their house on a public street. D’Urso-Rose mentioned that “the idea is for the public to to take a book & leave a book.” Another plan is creating a local map of all the little free libraries that will be built around the city.
This year’s book choice, A Man Called Ove is a novel written by Fredrik Backman, which centers on a man who recently lost his wife and falls into a deep state of depression and ends up having suicidal thoughts. He is found to be funny and tends to say things that one should not say out loud. Throughout the novel, the whole neighborhood and community try to pull him out of his sadness and become a part of his life through hilarious incidents. One reason the committee chose this book is to be able to tag along with the theme of getting to know people in your neighborhood and the community.
Every year, D’Urso-Rose said that the team “hope[s] to get more people reading book[s] more than ever before, talking about it with their friends, neighbors and fellow community members, and participating in at least one of the events offered.”
If you want to learn more about the Little Free Libraries project, you can visit the site littlefreelibrary.org or if you want to help out with Malden Reads, contact them at maldenreads@gmail.com.
