LIBRARY DAYS [W, 8-7-24]

BEYOND WINTER: Irrelevant Musings of an Old Man—LIBRARY DAYS [W, 8-7-24]

 

Not much time to write today. Family reunion this weekend. We’ll have to face our children, so we need to get to the library.

Our daughters--both being voracious readers, and one being a librarian--have been trying to get us to use our library more. We appreciate their efforts, but we already have a library. It’s called “The Living Room.” Its furnishings are shelves full of books, and coffee tables with piles of books, and rolling sofa-side tables with nooks and crannies full of books, plus, of course, the sofas on which we recline to read the books. Even the sofas usually have books standing or lying any place where our bodies are not. It’s a really good library, full of books that those very same daughters have given us. They have even written some of them.

Don’t get me wrong. We love libraries. We’ve used them a lot through all our years. But the main point is: BOOKS! It doesn’t matter where they come from.

Of course, our daughters know that. They are totally in favor of home libraries. They were both reading at 8^th grade level at the end of first grade, and they’ve never stopped. [I mean they’ve never stopped reading, not that they are still at 8^th grade level.] But we are old, and they think they should do something for us, because that’s what children are supposed to do for old parents—something. And the “something” of “helping” us to use the library is the “something” we are most likely to respond to, because, you know… BOOKS!

So, we went to the library, to get the kids off our back. Got a bunch of books. Selected them for interesting titles and good cover art. And ones that would fit in Helen’s Mary Englebreit book bag.

It takes me a long time to finish a book. I read in eight to ten books at a time--fiction, and all kinds of non-fiction, from science to literary theory. I usually read only one page a day. I want to see how disparate authors interact with one another. The rest of the family, and people in general, think that’s crazy.

After I’ve done one page of each of my current reads, then I start over and keep reading in the one that is most appealing to me that day. I keep some fictional “procedural,” like John Grisham or Michael Connely, going in case I need a non-thinking book that day.

Sometimes I read only one sentence a day. I did that with Kathleen Norris’ Dakota: A Spiritual Geography. I just didn’t want it to end. I want any good book to keep going and going.

So, off to the library. They don’t fine you for overdue anymore, but that’s the problem of going to the library, for old people. If you take books out, you have to return them some time.

Actually, you must be okay if the only complaint your children have about you is that you don’t use the library enough. 

BOOKS!

John Robert McFarland

Yes, the shelves in the photo above are the very ones where our returned books will go.