Rediscovering the Bibliothek

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My love for ze public library has been renewed today. But let me start from the beginning and tell you why I needed to go to the library.

My friends back home and I have formed a book club called the Twenty Somethings and Unemployed (TS&UE) Book Club. We meet once a month to discuss a book and just to catch up and such. We successfully completed our first assignment which was the Five People You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom earlier this month. I had already read it but I love to re-read books I enjoy and I always catch things I either forgot or did not get the first time anyway. Our exercise after reading the book was to come up with a list of five people we would like to meet in heaven. Most of us had some trouble thinking of people, but basically everyone agreed that they would want to meet their soulmate and/or a past lover up there. I find that meeting your soulmate is only ideal since your soul is up there meeting these five people. Why wouldn’t your soulmate be waiting for you? Anyway, this is a great book. It totally pulls on the heart strings and never ceases to make me bawl like a baby even though I know what’s going to happen.

So onto the library part… My friendlies from home had checked out the Five People You Meet in Heaven from the local library and that made me remember that the library is a wonderful place. Luckily I had my own copy of the book (which I lent to a friend over a year ago who refused to give it back so I had to storm over to said friend’s house and take it by force. To my dismay, it was covered in stains and bent all over the place. I cried a little.) but I kept a mental note that I should visit a library for the next book.

It has been so long since I read for fun that I forgot all about libraries that aren’t attached to a school. I mean, I have read some books for fun since being out of school but they were books I already owned for classes because I always fell behind and didn’t get to finish them during school. Thus, I read the interesting ones afterward to make myself feel slightly more accomplished.

I wanted to go to the library sooner but I had to find my library card at home, which, I found out this past weekend, is lost. I made time to go today so I could check out our next book (Chocolat by Joanne Harris) but first, I needed a card. Since my card was lost and I did not want to pay the $3.00 fine for lost cards (Yes, I am that stingy!), I signed up for a new one. I was scared they would find out I was already a cardholder because of the address on my license so I found a way around it and hoped they would not suspect a thing. It turns out, the public library, where they lend out books, DVDs and CDs for FREE and allow you FREE internet access is not that big on background checks. They took my pay stub with my apartment address and student ID with no questions asked. $3.00 charge averted. The new cards are quite snazzy, by the way. They even give you a keytag! Though I would still prefer the old green one with the word “Library” going across the front.

So long has it been since I really hung out in a library where the people around me weren’t frustrated students studying for tests and the books surrounding me weren’t research books that I had some trouble figuring out how to find my book. Maybe the library’s high techness is far beyond me…or MAYBE they have taken it too far. The last time I looked up a book at a public library, they were still using those computers with green and black screens (Don’t be alarmed, they had other computers for intrawebz that had more than two colors). This method worked fine! I tried to use the computers they have now to find my book but it came back without call numbers or anything. Maybe I am too old school.. It didn’t even give me the result for the book I wanted, so I had to go the old fashioned way and just look for it myself by genre and then last name. It took me three tries to find it because the names weren’t alphabetized right. Sigh.

Of course, when I go to a library I can’t just go and get one book (if this is a school library it’s because I have no choice but to leave with several). I came back with two others that were on that shelf near the registers that go along with some kind of theme of the month or something. One was Martha Stewart’s Encyclopedia of Crafts (because Martha Stewart can make something useful and artful out of a pile of poo if she had too) and the other was No Impact Man by Colin Beavan (because I have been reading all this press stuff about his movie and it never came up that he also wrote a book). I am so excited to read them! Snort.

So if this economy has got you down and you are a big fan of the written word… you have probably already been going to the library and think I am the last person on earth to figure this whole “free books” thing out. But seriously, stop buying books and filling up space in your house! Unless you constantly need to refer to these books then go buy them pre-loved! Otherwise, go to your local library. They even have wifi there nowadays so go ahead and make it an event!

Yes, I am fully aware that my post has made going to the library just a little bit less cool.

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