The Girl who Read One Hundred Books

Beverley’s passion for reading stood out the moment we began our interview. I met with Beverley at the new library in Canning Town, on 30th October 2025. Beverley was born in Edmonton in North London, to Jamaican parents, but moved to Newham as a young child, where she grew up and raised her own family.

In the interview, Beverley talks about her love of reading, and how she was advanced for her age, reading under the cover of torchlight long after her parents told her to go to bed, with the librarians struggling to keep up with book recommendations. She set herself a challenge to read 100 books in the space of a certain time. She was the bookworm in her family, and read to her younger siblings at bedtime. This wasn’t something she got from anyone else in her family, although her mother enrolled her in the library and would have attended with her when she was small. She took her own children to the library, and reading is an interest she shares with her 16 year-old granddaughter.

Beverley recalls feeling a great sense of pride in helping the librarians at the library with things like covering books and stamping books – which not many children would have been trusted to do. She also learnt to play chess at the library, set herself her own reading challenges, and later brought her own children to the library. She reflects on the changes she’s seen in the library over time, such as a dedicated children’s library, and different ways of managing your library account, from dark olive green library cards with yellow stamped stickers inside book covers, to digital apps where you can automatically renew your books. She speaks about the joy the library brought her, and how she would treasure the books she borrowed, handling them very carefully.