Why I Love the Library

I love books. I love the weight of a good hardcover and the casual air of a light paperback. There's something about looking at words in print, on paper, that makes me feel I'm made of flesh and blood. There's something tangible in turning a page that I cannot get with a Kindle. It's funny that there's an electronic device for reading with a name that sounds so much like kindling. I imagine "kindle" as the verb for kindling: "To collect twigs and dead leaves for starting a fire." I'm not sure if there's an irony there or not. You can't really use a Kindle as kindling, but you could use books in print. Doesn't the idea of burning a book send a chill up your spine, though? I feel evil lurking nearby when I think about books being burned.

Please don't jump to conclusions, though. I think the Kindle and other electronic devices have a place in the world. I think they're excellent for reading newspaper and magazine articles, essays, blogs, and even some short stories. But a novel? I'm sorry, but I can't imagine reading 350 pages on a computer screen. I mean, I want to get lost in a novel and I can't imagine being able to do that on an electronic device. I've tried; it doesn't work for me. The words begin as lies and as I read further the characters, the plot, the imagery, and the drama die before they're born. The novel is dead before it begins. I can't explain it. It might just be that I grew up reading books in print, but I think it's more complex than that.

Holding a hard plastic object is excellent for sturdiness if you're hitting buttons really fast while playing video games. It's good for scrolling through tons of posts on social media sites. It's good for data entry and programming software and many other things. But my senses require a malleable material for reading. I cannot get deeply into a story without the tactile sensation of pages, touching them, turning them, making marks on them with a pen or pencil, folding a corner of a page to mark a page I want to go back to later, and placing a well-designed bookmark to save my place. There's no mistaking what a person is doing when they are holding a book in their hands. If you are sitting in a coffeeshop you can even see what others are reading if they have printed books on them. The design of a good book cover is worth something. The font and color of the title tells a story as well. You know whether or not you want to strike up a conversation with a man or a woman when you can see that they are reading either Ayn Rand or Tom Robbins. If they're holding a Kindle or, anymore, their phone, you have no idea what they're doing; it's not even possible to tell whether they're reading let alone what they might be reading. Where's the fun in that? If you don't want others to know what you're reading then you may want to reconsider your reading choices.

Admittedly, some authors deserve to be read on electronic ink screens. John Grisham comes to mind. Jackie Collins. Danielle Steel. Dean Koontz. Michael Crichton. Tom Clancy. Harold Robbins. Sidney Sheldon. James Patterson. There are undoubtedly many others. But I don't think Tom Robbins should ever be read on e-book readers or a tablet. Haruki Murakami? Sacrilege! Charles Bukowksi? Seriously? You would read the grisly down-and-out fiction of the working man's working man on an electronic reading device?! I think Bukowski would piss on you if he was alive and saw you reading his works on an e-screen. The man was impoverished most of his life, part of the working poor, and you're going to read his words on an electronic screen ... to understand the words he wrote you need to have a dog-eared paperback that's just about ready to fall apart. If it's got duct tape and paperclips holding it together then all the better.

You could probably read Hunter S. Thompson on a Kindle, though. I don't know why, but I think it works with HST. Maybe it's because you could chop up lines of coke on the e-screen when you weren't using it for reading. Cormac McCarthy? Uh, no. Books and plays considered classics like those written by Dostoevsky, Hemingway, Austen, Shakespeare, Ibsen, Chaucer, Garcia Marquez, etc.? Maybe some, but probably not most. You could read F. Scott Fitzgerald on a Kindle. He was a narcissistic jackass and I can't think of a better medium to read The Great Gatsby than on the most garish electronic device imaginable.

The bottom line is that if the writer's words are alive then they should be read in tangible form. The printed page. If you could find hand-written novels then all the better. The point being that the books themselves fade and crumble and become soiled; wine has been spilled on pages, jam has stuck pages together, fingerprints of other readers can be seen. The words printed in books have a lifespan; they live and then they die--no matter how much Scotch tape or duct tape or staples you might use. And they should die. If the words are alive, truly alive, then they are mortal, just as the writers and readers are. To digitize is to immortalize. Nothing should live forever. Things should be forgotten so that they can be discovered again.

All of this brings me to the library, bricks-and-mortar buildings located at specific geographic spaces. Bookstores are wonderful as well, but they are dying fast, precariously close to becoming as extinct as Blockbuster. The quirky and eccentric little bookstores like those found in Portland, San Francisco, Boston, and other cities will probably live longer because those cities harbor writers and lovers of reading (I don't know what's happening world-wide; I know there were still bookstores in France, Germany, and The Netherlands a few years ago but I haven't been recently); in fact, there was a poll in Portland a year ago about what women found sexy in a man and reading was near the top of the list. Women in Portland, at least, like well-read men. They're better in bed ... or on a beach ... or wherever and whenever. Guys who read get creative; it's in their nature to be curious, playful, and adventurous.

Outside of the cities like Portland and Berkeley the bookstores are dying if not already dead. What is one to do if one wants to read a novel on the printed page? Amazon? Yes, ordering online is a possibility. It has been done, is done, and will be done. But good libraries, like really great bookstores (I'm thinking of you, Powell's), offer rooms and rooms and rooms filled with shelf after shelf after shelf all filled with books. Some books are short and stubby, some are wide and skinny, some are thick and weighty, some are cute and dainty. The color of the covers span the range of the rainbow. The subject matter is vast, everything under the sun, every subject you have even heard about is located in some room on some shelf somewhere in good libraries.

I'm sure some of you are thinking, "Yeah, but the Internet is far more vast than any single library and, possibly, all libraries combined." Undoubtedly true. But just as the printed page gives you tactile sensation as well as the smell of the book pages (new book smell or musty old paperback smell?), the library offers the added attraction of movement through three dimensional space. Your browser can transport from site to site, but in a library you get to transport from subject to subject, from author to author. And there's always a chance of meeting someone extraordinarily special at a bookstore or library. You're into science fiction, particularly Ursula Le Guin, and you walk down the aisle to where her books should be and ... who is that hunky guy standing right ... in ... front ... of ... Ursula? Takes your breath away, doesn't it, meeting a stranger who happens to not only love the same genre as you but also considers your favorite author his favorite author? Before online dating, meetings like that started rewarding relationships. Can you put a price on seeing the look in a stranger's eyes when they're considering a book? Hell, that's as fulfilling as reading a great novel! Even if you never say a word, you're witnessing one of the most intimate moments a person will show to strangers in public.

Libraries are sexual. Curiosity fills the air and there's as much creativity in the search for books as there is in the books themselves. Why ... why would you want to avoid being immersed in an environment like that? Going to Amazon may be convenient, but you're not going to meet anyone you don't know, you're not going to accidentally bump into a long lost friend, you're not going to witness the wonder and surprise on the faces of those who have found the book they wanted ... or the book they didn't know they wanted until they saw it!

I have lied down in aisles of libraries reading books. People don't even become alarmed. In the past, they just stepped over me on their way. Occasionally I'd have to roll out of the way or sit up if someone wanted to look where I was lying. But that was always cool because if they were looking right there then chances were that they were interested in the same stuff I was. I met many a friend that way, a couple of intimate relationships, and one hot, sexy one-night hookup. Obviously, the library isn't strictly for meeting people. That's just gravy on top. The main point is to commune with the books, to flirt with those that catch your eye even though you know it's never going to go anywhere, and to sigh deeply as you discover a new author.

It was that way for me when I first picked up Murakami's Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. By the end of the first page I was in love. I thought to myself, "How come I've never heard about you? You're amazing!" I checked out the book, went home, started really reading. I looked him up online and of course he was well-renown. He was one who slipped by me. I was so happy that he had, though, because he had a bunch of other books in print! I knew I didn't have to fret as I neared the end of Chronicle because Murakami left other gifts for me as well. I have felt for a long time like I should write him a thank you note. The man opened up avenues of thought in my mind I did not realize could exist on this plane of existence: "Oh, hey, there's this whole other part of my brain that's been completely dormant. I didn't even know you existed. From the other parts of my brain you just looked like a broom closet I never needed, but there's a damn treasure chest in here! Holy Shit, how fucking cool!"

Murakami's trademark is a sort of postmodern magical realism. Call it what you will, though, the words fuck with your brain and if you allow yourself to really fall into the worlds he creates it's inevitable that your perspective on what you considered reality will change. "Learning" Murakami was like learning a new language or advanced mathematics. My thought has never been the same after reading him. I never would have found him online; I wouldn't have been looking and I wouldn't have seen the book binding jumping out as more grand than the others around it; I wouldn't have held the weight of the 500+ page book in my hand or read that first page in that special silence that can only be found in a library.