Oxford High School Library

Happy Lunar New Year from the library! We’re especially excited to read @geneluenyang’s Lunar New Year Love Story 🎆❤️

Extra thanks to our catering team, and to the amazing pupil Library Reps who made sure everything ran smoothly. You will not find better Library Reps the world over, in my view!

We hosted our first ever Reading Café in the library last night! The theme was ‘international reading’, and a fabulous mix of pupils, parents and staff from the @OxfordHighSch community shared books and poetry (and cookies) from all around the world. Thank you so much for coming!

Day 14! School libraries in Oxford have Philip Pullman on tap, of course, and at this time of year we’ll be reading Once Upon a Time in the North, an Arctic episode from the universe of His Dark Materials. Discover the story of Lee Scoresby and Iorek Byrnison's first meeting…

Fantastic news! #SpellowLibrary reopens today after it was severely damaged by rioters this summer. Last night over 120 libraries across the country showed solidarity with colleagues in Liverpool by light a lamp or light in the library's windows. #ShareTheLight #SpellowLibrary

Day 13! Mystery queen @FleurHitchcock's books are always out on loan in our library, so we're very excited about her latest, Murder at Wintertide. George and his family are celebrating Christmas by the sea. But then a body washes up on the beach...

It's 1347 and fifteen-year-old Will, an orphan boy, lives at Crowfield Abbey. Sent into the forest to gather wood, he rescues instead, a creature from a trap - a hob, who shares with Will a terrible secret... Day 12 of OHS Library Advent is The Crowfield Curse by @PatWalsh777!

Day 11! During the weeks leading up to Christmas, Bill Furlong, a coal and timber merchant, faces into his busiest season. As he does the rounds, he feels the past rising up to meet him - and encounters the complicit silences of a people controlled by the Church...

Day 10! The Dark is Rising - always recommended. It's Christmas-time in the Stanton family house: presents, carol singing, good cheer. But for eleven-year-old Will Stanton, something sinister has begun… (You can also listen on the BBC! bbc.co.uk/programmes/w13…)

OHS Staff Book Club discussed Claire Keegan's Small Things Like These at our December meeting! ❄️ So much to talk about in one very small book...

“All the Christmases roll down toward the two-tongued sea, like a cold and headlong moon bundling down the sky that was our street; and they stop at the rim of the ice-edged, fish-freezing waves, and I plunge my hand in the snow and bring out whatever I can find…” Day 9! 🎄

Friend of the school @redbreastedbird’s books are wildly popular here; we’d be remiss not to include Mistletoe and Murder in our festive countdown. Detective duo Daisy Wells and Hazel Wong meet danger lurking in the dark stairwells of Maudlin College over Christmas… Day 8!

🎄 Catch Your Death 🎄 Proud to feature one of our #GDSTBookAward shortlisted books for 2025! Catch Your Death by Ravena Guron is a thrilling tale set in the grand Bramble Estate during a snowstorm. #AdventCalendar #OHS #BooksOfInstagram #OHSReads #CountdownToChristmas

Day 7: A girls’ boarding school story set in Austria, with mountains, lakes, hot cocoa and adventures? Sign us up! Strap your skis on for the first in the Chalet School series. (First published nearly 100 years ago in 1925, this book does show views and language of the time.)

Thank you to the enthusiastic Year 7s who helped illustrate our Winter Reading display, with the power of Posca pens! 🌟🌟🌟

One for our 6th formers interested in medicine, who enjoyed This Is Going To Hurt. Christmas is coming, the goose is getting fat, but 1.4 million NHS staff are heading off to work. A hilarious, horrifying & heartbreaking peek behind the blue curtain at Christmas by @amateuradam

Never forget: READING FOR PLEASURE has the biggest positive impact of any factor on children's life chances. So never stop sharing books with kids. Never stop reading to them, and helping them to read. Never stop changing lives. #literacy

A parody of the worst sort of family Christmas: unsuitable presents, unpleasant insertions into the pudding and Aunt Ada Doom orders Amos to carve the turkey, adding: 'Ay, would it were a vulture, 'twere more fitting!' Christmas at Cold Comfort Farm is Library Advent Day 5 🎁

A favourite of this librarian, Day 4 is Tove Jansson’s beautiful Moominland Midwinter. While the rest of the Moomin family are in their winter hibernation, Moomintroll discovers a world hitherto unknown to him...

We were lucky enough to have Kiran Millwood Hargrave visit OHS this year, so of course The Way Past Winter is in our advent countdown! Mila and her sisters live with their brother, Oskar, in a small forest cabin in the snow. One night, a fur-clad stranger arrives...