Confessions Of A Library Junkie

From the day I learned to read, books have been my sanctuary, my inspiration, and my escape. The oft-quoted “So Many Books, So Little Time” is the story of my life. Through books I’ve explored times before I was born, places I both want to see and those that are lost to history, and have met people both real and imagined who have taught, enriched, and amazed me. And from the beginning, my portal to the world of books has been the public library.

Early on, my mother realized that my appetite for books would far surpass anything our family’s tight budget could satisfy, so we made the trek to our small town’s library. I can still see its upstairs kids’ area, with its rows upon rows of books, all free, waiting just for me. I am sure if I visited today it would seem small, but to my six-year-old eyes it was huge, and was the most wondrous place I could imagine. Mom led me to the children’s biography section, where I literally started at one end of the shelf and read my way to the other end. I took out the maximum number of volumes, which I recall to be ten, allowed each time I visited the library. The stack was quickly devoured, and my voracity kept Mom driving me back to the library weekly for another book fix.

I consumed bios of many famous Americans, but my favorite of all the historical figures was Abraham Lincoln. Something about his hardscrabble beginnings, his too-tall bookish self, and his bouts of melancholy resonated with me. Like me, he loved books and loved learning, but sadly there was no library for him in the frontier of his day.

My love affair with and addiction to books soon branched out from biographies to fiction. I loved the stories which came in series, because you could really get to know the characters and get inside their worlds. My absolute all time favorite was The Little House books. I didn’t just read Little House on the Prairie, I lived it and believed it. I wanted to be Laura and wanted to ride in the covered wagon with Ma and Pa and their good old bulldog Jack. I read those books so many times that my mother finally wouldn’t let me check them out anymore, insisting that I try something else.

Throughout junior high and high school I haunted the library and took out dusty tomes that no other self-respecting teenager had looked at in years. I read through the school’s entire collection of Steinbeck, Hemingway and Tolstoy. I even picked up a few books that I had to hide under my mattress, for fear my mother would find them and see what I was reading and learning (Forever, by Judy Blume, anyone?)

For several years after my children were born, I stopped reading for myself. The repetitive nature of The Very Hungry Caterpillar and The Cat in the Hat, both great books, to be sure, leaves but little energy for grownup literature. But in time the kids grew up and out of board books and we progressed to more advanced reading. When Alex was five, I took him to the then-new Southwestern Branch library to get his own library card and took Sophie on the same errand a few years later. Somewhere I still have those library cards with their crooked little kindergarten “signatures” on the back.

I loved introducing my kids to the world of reading, but the best part of taking them to the library was the joy I felt in reconnecting with my own neglected love of books. I started to read again, and discovered how much I had missed in my several years’ hiatus. Now, there’s almost never a week that I’m not picking up a new book, or three, at my local branch library, either for my grad-school work or just for some “fun” reading.

I truly don’t think I would be the person I am today if it hadn’t been for the wealth of resources the public library has made available to me. Several years ago we were shopping for a new home, and our decision to stay in Dallas rather than move to a nearby suburb was based largely on the strength of Dallas’ library system. Now I hear that that the city is going to cut the branches’ hours and reduce the materials budget to save money, and this panics me. I am blessed be able to afford my own books now, but even Amazon.com or Barnes and Noble don’t give me the same rush as walking into a library and being surrounded by books, floor to ceiling. The sheer possibility of all those stories, real and imaginary, that I can try on to my heart’s content, gives me a feeling of hope and wonder. I hope the city council will choose to continue funding our libraries, and keep them well-stocked for those people, especially the kids like me and Honest Abe, who might find their wings, and their passion in life, in the pages of a book.