Library love
I have a weakness for books. If I freely indulged myself, I’d be poverty-stricken in no time flat. I’ve got such long lists of books to read that if I were to actually to get to all of them it would take several lifetimes, and if I didn’t keep myself under strict control (where, oh where are the 12-step programs for book addicts?) I’d be crowded out of house and home, or could be featured on the show “Hoarders” as a warning to others.
But the library provides just the right outlet for my book-acquiring urges. I always take more out than I can read, but not too many more (after all, there’s a limit to what I can carry), and there’s really no downside to it unless I manage to incur fines—which I do periodically, but just a few dollars here and there, which I consider a small donation to the cause.
As a child, I looked forward to library day as though it were a holiday. I’d prevail on my mother to take me there, and once we arrived I’d get down to business and collect my treasures. Until I was twelve and could go to the adult room, I had to abide by the cruel rules that limited me to six books a pop. Oh, the solemn deliberations! I’d pile up the candidates on an empty table and weigh their attributes, contemplating which was worth more to me, the book on geology or the next volume in Noel Streatfeild’s “Shoes” series—and wondering whether, if I passed one of them up this time, it would still be there next time I tried to find it or whether some other rival child would have claimed it.
At home, I could hardly wait. There they sat, like a bunch of unopened but gaily-wrapped presents on Christmas morning, bright with promise. Then I’d choose the most enticing (the biggest? the most colorful?), turn to its first page, and begin.
I’d try to stretch out the pleasure—in the same way I gamely tried to save my Halloween candy so that it would last longer. But, as with the sweets, I’d succumb quickly to my desires. Typically I’d read all the books in the first couple of days, slowed down only by my mother standing over me periodically and wringing her hands, ordering me to go outside and play.
What was she so worried about? A lot of things. I might atrophy into a sitting or reclining position (I tended to read while sprawled on couch or bed). I might need glasses some day. I might be abnormal (maybe I already was!). I might even become that dread thing, a female intellectual.
What can I say; it was a long time ago. But I still love the library. And when I was in my thirties I discovered a new (at least to me) treat: inter-library loan. Like the genie in the fairy tales, the library was saying to me, “Your wish is my command!”, honoring requests to the best of its ability, scouring the land for the titles of my choice.
I’d often stay up all night reading, even when I was the mother of a young child and I knew I’d be exhausted the next day. Books are company, books are learning, books are interacting with other interesting minds, books are escape. Books are—well, here’s Emily Dickinson, who knew a thing or two about the subject:
There is no Frigate like a Book
To take us Lands away
Nor any Coursers like a Page
Of prancing Poetry ”“
This Traverse may the poorest take
Without oppress of Toll ”“
How frugal is the Chariot
That bears the Human Soul ”“
[ADDENDUM: Here’s a previous post of mine about a formative library experience of my youth, featuring the NY Public Library and my mother as the stars.]
I only had rather small county library, but it was one block from my school, halfway to my bus stop, so it was heaven for someone who did not come from a family of readers. I must say that I would not have been turned on by a geology book. I was more into Trixie Belden and Cherry Ames till I got to high school. In my freshman year, the school had a book sale, where I bought To Kill a Mockingbird. I can still remember where the stack stood on the library table.
…I still stay up all night long reading. Paper, Kindle, e-Reader on ‘droid and straight off the ‘net.
…and yeah, though the older I get, the less sleep I apparently see, tp need (6 hours at most currently, and 5 seems about right …if I force myself back to sleep, I’m woozy & lethargic for most of the following day), the harder to recover from an all night reading session.
Plus, the eyes ain’t gettin’ no better, either.
see, tp = seem to
…further proof about the eyes. Sigh.
My high school English teacher was a bachelor who lived alone and spent most of his time reading. In retrospect, I think of him as a true classical scholar.
He once commented that he kept a list of all of the books he wanted to read. Although he kept crossing off those he read, the list grew longer every year.
I have kept a similar list, which is becoming a bit different in recent years. More and more the books I have been adding are ones I have read and crossed off a half century or more ago.
When I have a book, I do not even mind waiting in line.
Jim
Oh, the Noel Streatfield books! I read them over and over. For a few precious years when I was in grade school, we lived near our small-town library, so that I could walk there as often as I wanted to exchange my stack of four books (all we were allowed at a time) for a new stack of four. However, the library was very small — just one room, with only six or seven not-very-tall bookcases of fiction for kids too old for picture books — so it didn’t take me long to read everything it had that interested me (even though I was interested in pretty much everything except stories about boys playing football), with years left until I reached the magic age of 12 so I could enter the adult section on the other side of the circulation desk. So, I started over and read the ones I had liked best again. And again. And again. In those days you checked out a book by writing your name on the card in the envelope on the inside back cover of the book and giving it to the librarian, who stamped the due date on the envelope and kept the card. She’d point out that I had checked the book out before, roll her eyes, and let me have it anyway. Some of the cards — for the Narnia books, “A Wrinkle in Time,” “Little Women,” Asimov’s science fiction anthology “Tomorrow’s Children” — had columns of just my name, over and over. (It was a very small town and there weren’t too many other kids as bookish as I was.)
Finally, the librarian took pity on me and let me into the adult section a year or so early. What a disappointment! There was almost nothing over there to rival the riches of the kids’ shelves — though I do remember the joy of finding “The Once and Future King” and a forgotten-by-now novel by Carolyn Glyn about a British schoolgirl called “Don’t Knock the Corners Off.”
Ahh, libraries. Now that you’ve reminded me, I’m going to read the Noel Streatfield books again.
Joseph Epstein, the critic and professor of literature, once described his dismay when he realized one day that there were only so many books one could read in a lifetime. There were authors and whole literatures he would never get around to exploring. Even before electronic publishing, there were 40,000 or so new titles published every year in the US. And Richard Rodriguez tells of a professor who opined that you had to read about 5000 books before you could have a serious idea. I’m nowhere near that, but I do comment on blogs.
I love Project Guttenberg, Calibre, and my e-Reader, which in conjunction are allowing me to re-read the classics. Great stuff!
davisbr,
I hear you about the eyes.
Neoneocon,
I grew up in a very similar manner. My mother found it ddifficult to punish me because grounding me to the house for a day simply meant I would curl up with a good book–or two–or three, and she was wise enough to not punish me by grounding me from reading (thanks Mom!).
At another level though, as I age I find that the pleasure of reading is, by itself, not enough. It is not my intention to turn myself into a walking archive of information that will someday cease to exist, but I find that I am more and more obsssed with the prospect of using the knowledge I glean through reading.
Neoneocon does that, at least in one way, by the threads on this blog. Whether opinion or fact, it is one end result of knowledge at work. We commenters contribute to that and use such knowledge on our own simply by commenting here.
Many of us can use that data and perspicacity in our workaday lives as it melds with our pursuits. So are there suggestions for other ways that we turn the result of this love of reading outward so that it becomes a living contribution to the world around us?
I discovered real books the summer after third grade. I read 3 books that summer: The Wizard of Oz, Treasure Island and Tom Sawyer. I have been addicted ever since. I remember one of my friends giving me my first sexual insult as he accused me of being half girl because every time he came over I was reading a book. It’s funny, I just thought I was reading a book.
” I might even become that dread thing, a female intellectual.”
Well, you sure fooled her.
Oh yes, this is my story.
I got my first library card when I was 5 years old. We lived on the far NW side of Chicago and there wasn’t even a Public Library branch built yet. We had the Bookmobile! I can still see it and feel the excitement when Mom took us on Thursdays.
Mom never discouraged my reading because my Grandmother used to bug her about hers. So I was enabled from an early age.
I have belonged to many, many libraries in my life but I received a shock when I moved to Philadelphia 16 years ago. We have the saddest little public library that is right around the corner from our house. In the city where the first library was created, the public libraries are woefully inadequate as a rule.
So, of course, I have been forced to purchase most of my books. This has led to a bit of an obsession so it is logical that what I give up for Lent is the purchasing of books. Worse than a chocolate fast, believe me.
Janet,
America’s first Bookmobile was in my home county. See this:
http://www.whilbr.org/bookmobile/index.aspx
I used to visit a motorized version when I visited my cousins who lived in the country.
Expat,
Thanks for the history lesson. Our Bookmobile was a refurbished bus, not a Library Wagon. I didn’t realize just how long books have been mobile.
And look what’s coming up on April 11 – National Bookmobile Day!:
http://www.ala.org/offices/olos/nbdhome
I wonder if my situation is typical?
Where I live my library is affiliated with, at last count, about 55 other libraries throughout the state and at least one adjacent state. The program is called Link+ and makes borrowing from any one of the libraries as seamless as borrowing from my local library.
There’s no filling out paperwork and waiting forever for an Inter-library loan to go through (if it even does). I just request the book (via computer, of course) as I would any local book and it shows up at my local library in no more that several days.
I remember my first credit card charge like alcoholics remember their first drink…”Nora: A Biography of Nora Joyce”, from Shakespeare & Co. on the Upper West Side.