Speaking of libraries, this may be a stunning confession for an editor to make, but until this January, I hadn't visited the county library in at least a year. The telltale sign? My old library card, which looks something like the first image here, only sporting a magenta-lettered RENEW DEC 07 sticker.
My U. City library card also lapsed during that time (is still lapsed, in fact), but its inscrutable face offers no indication of a renewal date; one day last year, I simply went to request a book online and found that I couldn't. "Oh well," I thought. "It's probably better this way."
You see, I rack up library fines like some people rack up bar tabs. Have for the longest time, and the librarians know it. (I'm sure I'm flagged as a repeat offender—or donor—in both systems.) In the past half-decade, I've gone from being that girl who inevitably finished the latest book in a single evening to being a woman who scarcely merits the title of "reader," with a stack of a half-dozen half-read books next to the bed at all times. Woefully, it sometimes takes me months now to get through a single volume, between working, eating, sleeping, and my Diablo II addiction.
When I go to the library now, I inevitably overreach, and as I keep books longer and longer, hoping to find time to finish them, I sometimes end up spending more than it would've cost to buy them in the first place. (See: my $6.75 fine from 2006 for Stephen King's Cell, which I could now get on Amazon for less than $3. And there's a reason for that.) So when DEC 07 came around, and I realized I'd have to pay to park at the library in Clayton (does that seem wrong to anyone else?) just to renew my card, I thought, "Eh, to heck with it," and let it go.
There was some conscious strategy to my nonrenewal, of course. I forced myself to stop renting movies at Blockbuster around the same time, vowing to make better use of my Netflix subscription and stop renting on impulse—because renting, even with Blockbuster's newly lenient return policies and a location just a block from home, often has the same result for me as the library does: fines, fines, fines. On some level, it all began to boil down to cost control—better to read the books and watch the movies I already have (or have access to), I thought, than to continue giving way to impulse and accruing fines.
And that was fine ... to a point. Inevitably, though, there were books I wanted to read that weren't on my shelf. I bought some on Amazon, but quickly realized this new habit would cost me even more than the fines did.
So when my mother asked me what I wanted to do for my birthday, my answer was easy:
"Take me to the library." —Margaret Bauer, Associate Editor
Tomorrow: Close encounters of the librarian kind!
