I Although I’m a greedy reader, it’s easy to feel that there are too many books in the world. How do you find time to keep up with all these new releases? Not to mention the overwhelming power that even comes from stepping into a bookstore. There, not only faces the latest titles, but also classics that you’ve missed and biographies you’ve never heard of, but you’re drawn to yourself. The libraries are the same. The book masses stimulate inertia too often.
But just around the corner from my house is the local Little Street Library. I have a small wooden box with a plastic door, a donated book from my neighborhood.
If the books are really squeezed and stacked up on each other, it probably fits two dozen books. In a world filled with overwhelming choices, I love this little Whitdown choice. There may be a book I want to read, maybe not. But making that choice feels very easy.
The small library peers inside my middle class neighbourhood. There are people, or people, who are cleaning up their diet cooking collections. Someone who gets advanced reading copies and hands them out. Those who constantly delete monthly copies are one or two months after it is released. I’d like to know who seem to be slowly clearing my playscript collection. I’m interested in people who take down people who are readers of the seemingly endless supply of celebrity memoirs, science fiction novels. I wonder if the kids grew up from these picture books or they simply didn’t like it.
Through their book selection, I feel closer to suburban people.
If I have only a limited selection to choose from, I often turn over to read advertising letters in books I have never heard of before.
In my neighborhood, I have people who taste very similar to books, but they are tapped into different circles. So I find a book that is perfectly suited to me, but somehow I handed me over: a book like Cho Nam-Joo’s fun and strange novel Kim Ji-Young, born in 1982, Korea About depression and sexism. Or the night of VV Ganeshanantan’s epic about the Sri Lankan civil war and a drastic, but still small and intimate brothers.
I got a huge book that came out 10 years ago, but I hadn’t read it at the time. This is how I began to read the beautiful memoirs of Paul Caranity, Donna Tart’s Goldfinch (now one of my favourite novels).
I’ve read books that I never thought I’d pick them up from anywhere else. When a huge fan of Ann M Martin’s Baby-Sitters Club series was younger, I love finding strange copies of the graphic novel adaptations (drawn by Raina Telgemeier). It was the first time I loved these stories. After experiencing poor reading, I found out that someone had wiped out a big selection of Jody Picoll. I haven’t read her in 15 years, but picking up things I’ve never read before is a panacea. (When I went to read the second one, I reached my fill and turned my attention to other places.)
Though I’m not a huge genre reader, I choose Richard Osman’s The Thursday Murder Club on a whim for a quick plane read. I devoured it and am excited to see the next book in the Little Library series in a few weeks. I return copies when I read them, and I imagine a private book club that my neighbor and I have when reading in turn.
I’m still buying the latest release. I’m still using a library card. But there’s something wonderful about the quietness of my small local library, how it leads to books that aren’t in front of my neighborhood and my heart. I stop by every few days. You can see if the books I contributed were picked up. I hope there is something new to me to accept. Often I don’t pick up new ones. But a bit of a reflection of where I live, the book is waiting for me the next time I stop by and slowly flip over.
