Library Love

Image from Goodreads.

I just finished reading This Book is Overdue: How Librarians and Cybrarians can Save Us All, by Marilyn Johnson. And it's fantastic. Biggest takeaway: Learn more about the Connecticut Four, who are the subject of Chapter Five of this book. They fought back when the FBI demanded information about who'd been using the library computers. Learn about them-- this is the kind of thing we need to know.

If you read the Goodreads reviews, you'll see the responses are mixed. The points about the book being disjointed and not having a clear idea of what it's about are fair enough. Especially interesting, IMO, are the reviews from librarians, since this book is about their field.

However! I loved it, in no small part because libraries have kept me reading my entire life. I just dashed off a Goodreads review of Full House, a book I read as a freshman in high school that was solidly among my list of books to never, ever take home, because my parents would have freaked out. Our fantastic little library in my hometown kept me sane as a teen, allowing me to escape from the weird that is high school and my parents' insistence on keeping the TV running all the time. (Sidebar: when my family raced to my side after Chadwick passed away, they went something like 36 hours without the TV on because we just don't watch it that much, until my father finally couldn't take it any longer and turned it on. And that's what happens to people who don't spend enough time in a library.)

As much as I would love to own many of the books that I read, as much as I want to support authors, my book buying budget is sadly limited to buying just a handful of books a year, and in recent years that budget has been entirely spent on textbooks. So I use the library as my second bookshelf, so to speak, until such time as I'm independently wealthy and can build my own library with a small bedroom and kitchen attached.

Do you use your local library? What's your favorite thing about it? If you don't use the library-- why not?