Library Love

Nova Scotia has a library system linking all the university libraries together, from the Cape Breton University to the Agricultural College. You can get books from any of these libraries delivered to the library of your choice for pickup. This means a wide variety of books at your disposal.

Although I find that if at all possible, I like to go to the libraries themselves to pick up the books, and browse around the shelves. After all, the books are arranged by subject matter too, so there're a bunch of books together all relating to the same subject from different angles within the same shelf.

I love picking up books from the library to peek through the contents and decide whether or not to take them home. I love that I don't have to pay for them at the counter.

I'm very much a cyber-inclined person; I spend a great deal of time reading and writing blogs, catching up with the rest of the world on the Internet, and this is one of the few ways I stay connected to the rest of the world. But you know, sometimes there are times when you don't want o be connected to the rest of the world and just want to retreat inside.

With books, I can do that. I can pull into myself and forget about the rest of the world. They're also not so hard on my eyes.

And I love the physicality of books. I love opening them up, like it's a lover's secret I'm hearing for the first time. I run my eyes over the text quickly or slowly, or repeatedly over the same paragraph that I find particularly interesting. I can flip the pages and savour the sound - it sounds like kissing. Books are always different, and libraries always have something new to share.

Libraries are not much like boyfriends, since they have no needs, so they don't have anything to whine about, be passive-aggressive about, to demand. Libraries don't move at will and are always waiting, with open bookshelves (oh, those pesky opening hours!) waiting for me to open my mind. It's a love that keeps on giving so long as I pay my library fees. Every book I pick up is an opportunity for learning, for knowing more, for feeding the continual hunger and quenching the continual thirst for more knowledge, for greater understanding. It is the perfect supplementary for everything I read online.

I daresay libraries are more constant than lovers.

Libraries + Internet = Win

One day I would like to open a cafe with a wide variety of books on wall-to-wall shelves for my customers' perusal and offer WiFi at the same time. There will be cubicles for people to work on laptops and computer stations for those who can't afford their own computers. It'll be a library cyber cafe that will combine it all and it will be glorious.

Ah, pipe dreams....

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