I now have a library card! Well, I did have two previously, one for the Peninsula and San Jose systems from when I lived in California, but I hadn’t gotten around to getting a new one when I moved to D.C. Yesterday I visited the newly renovated Bethesda branch, which is near my office. Being there really brought back childhood memories of the long afternoons I spent at the library at Gellert Park near our house in Daly City. Pardon me for waxing romantic about the library, but really, there is a feeling of discovery and even civic pride in browsing through the stacks and knowing that everything is freely available to you with your all-powerful card. Granted, such a place carries other associations: frantically running around a campus library gathering materials for your soon-to-be hastily written term paper–oh, I’ve been there–isn’t the most pleasurable use of such facilities and thus a slightly different experience, which is perhaps the reason my leisurely post-college re-discovery of the public library is now so welcome.
I checked out Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf; The Best American Travel Writing 2002, edited by Frances Mayes; and A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson. I’ve started on the latter, which attempts to answer some of the most basic and profound questions of science in an accessible and entertaining way, and so far it succeeds. It’s a good read.
Another nice thing about going to the library is that hopefully it will curb my book buying and over-accumulation. I haven’t quit cold turkey just yet, though: yesterday morning I went online and bought the new David Sedaris collection, Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, and Augusten Burroughs’ Running with Scissors. (They’re expected to arrive tomorrow. Yay for Barnes & Noble.com’s “Faster Delivery.”) One last thing: David is on the road with bookstore appearances and will be in town at the Olsson’s at Courthouse (Arlington) on June 14. A full-fledged tour is scheduled for this fall. [Update (3 June): He was interviewed and read excerpts on NPR’s Morning Edition today.]
4 replies on “Returning my overdue self to the library”
Somehow, I feel like it would ruin the fragile, brittle world that David Sedaris lives in if I were to actually meet him.
Ah, I remember my library card for the San Jose public library. My branch was Pearl Avenue, and when you checked out a book, they scanned the bar code and you got a printed receipt with the titles telling you when they were due. How high tech! When I bought my house in Arlington 6 years ago, I went down the street to the library to get a card, and they informed me that I already had one–they still had me in their files from when I was in 1st grade living in Arlington. Now *that’s* efficient… or fascist, I can’t decide which.
Libraries never seem to have the books I want to read which is especially annoying when you want to read a series and they have #1 and #3 but not the #2 which you need. I gave up on them long ago. I haven’t seen the revamped Bethesda. Is it nice?
I just got my first library card (as an adult anyway) last week! I was so excited about it – books everywhere!
Hello Jeff,
Sometime last week, I went to the San Francisco Library, remember that state of the art one. I went to the video section, maybe to borrow a fitness stuff. My younger sister told me a few days before that that if I were a resident of Concord, I would be able to go that fitness place she just enrolled at. Too bad I do not live there.
There were hundreds of videos of varied subjects, I ran out of time to pick one. Ah, next time I will.
Cheers,
Jo