Professional Documents
Culture Documents
READING ROOM
For most readers and writers — and book lovers in general — the library holds a special place of
honor and respect. We asked several authors to tell us about their local public library or to share
a memory of a library from their past.
My Temple
The first library I knew was an upstairs room over a storefront in my little Kentucky town,
with a librarian who didn’t approve of children handling books. (I begged; she relented.) The
second was a van kitted out with bookshelves and sent out on the rounds of our rural county, a
godsend to children and many adults who had no easy way of getting to town. The Bookmobile
was the whole world parked on my gravel road. It came once a month, and we were allowed
only three books at a time, but the Bookmobile lady had a heart. She let me check out as many
as I could carry.
Everywhere I’ve gone since, I’ve found libraries. Those of us launched from bare-bones
schools in uncelebrated places will always find particular grace in a library, where the temple
doors are thrown wide to all believers, regardless of pedigree. Nowadays I have the normal
professional reliance on internet research, but my heart still belongs to the church of the
original source. Every book I’ve written has some magic in it I found in physical stacks or
archives.
Or the facade, in the case of my first novel. The library I frequented in Tucson was draped in
wisteria with long, dangling pods: the bean trees. For my latest, it was a cache of letters
Charles Darwin wrote to a lady scientist in Vineland, N.J. Once it was a very old Kikongo-
English dictionary I found in the University of Arizona library’s special collections. It wasn’t
supposed to leave the room, but I am persuasive. I said, “Something good could happen if you
let me borrow this book.” I took it home; a novel called “The Poisonwood Bible” happened.
This is my thank-you note to every librarian who’s ever helped a kid like me, nobody from
nowhere, find her doorway through a library shelf into citizenship of the world. If one of them
ever begs you to bend the rules, I’m going to say: Let her do it.
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These are some of the things I personally have done at the St. Louis County Library
headquarters, located in a suburb across from a shopping mall: celebrated the publication of
my two most recent books by giving readings; had my picture taken for a magazine article;
attended readings by Colson Whitehead, Emily Giffin, Ron Suskind, Tracy Chevalier, George
Hodgman, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and many other authors.
Two of my peak St. Louis experiences — as in the most intensely St. Louisiest — occurred at
the county library headquarters. In 2007, when we’d been living here just a few months, my
then-fiancé and now-husband and I attended a reading by Jonathan Franzen. To some in the
book world, Franzen is a talented curmudgeon. To St. Louisans, he is a hometown boy made
good, and we are very proud of him.
At Franzen’s 2007 event, he read an essay about selling his parents’ house, located in a
neighborhood just a few miles away from where he stood. During the Q. and A. session, it
emerged that quite a few people in the audience knew Franzen or his family and perhaps even
made cameos in his nonfiction. I was filled with a good and surprising feeling: Because I now
live in St. Louis, I thought, I will have experiences, including literary experiences, that I
wouldn’t have if I lived elsewhere.
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Ten years later, I was invited to conduct an onstage interview that was also a library fund-
raiser with another beloved native son: the actor Jon Hamm. More than 800 people, about 95
percent of whom were women, were crammed into chairs set up in the space usually occupied
by bookshelves, and those of us who weren’t already smitten with Hamm before he spoke
certainly were after. He was charming and funny and unreasonably handsome as he
acknowledged that St. Louis is a city with both serious problems and many wonderful
qualities. This past August, I moved to Minneapolis. But that hunch I’d had a decade before, in
the very same building, had been borne out: In the library and elsewhere, because I lived in St.
Louis, I have had experiences I wouldn’t have had if I lived elsewhere.
In the beginning, I would head for the children’s library, in the back, open the card index,
which listed books by subject, and explore ghosts or magic, time travel or space. I would find a
book I liked, and read everything by the author. I discovered that the librarians could, through
the wonder of the interlibrary loan, get me books they did not have, and that they would. As far
as the librarians were concerned, I was just another customer, and I was treated with a level of
respect that I don’t recall getting anywhere else, even at school.
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Eventually, I just started reading the children’s library alphabetically, working my way
through it author by author. I cannot imagine being happier than that. I would walk home
when the library closed at 6, and be home in time for dinner. It was a perfect arrangement, one
marred only by hunger, so I would take a sandwich in a plastic bag, and grudgingly head
outside to the parking lot to scoff it as quickly and efficiently as I could. Eating time was not
reading time.
As I entered my teen years I had read the children’s library and so moved into the adult
library. Nobody tried to stop me. I discovered that reading it alphabetically meant that I was
encountering a number of very dull books indeed, so I started moving through looking for
favorite authors — Brian Aldiss in the A’s, Ursula K. Le Guin in the G’s, R. A. Lafferty in the L’s
and so on. By this time I was walking to the library in the morning, walking home at night
when they closed. It was still my favorite place in the world. They knocked it down and built a
new library when I was 17, and now that library too is gone.
Librarians sometimes discourage me from telling this story. They point out that libraries
should not be seen or used as child-minding services, and that feral children should be
discouraged from raising themselves in the shelves and the stacks. These things are true.
Still, if there is a heaven, one of the many mansions it must contain is a red brick Victorian
building, all wood and shelves, waiting for me. And the shelves will be filled with books by
beloved authors, as good as or better than the ones I knew. I will read my way through the
adult library, and then, to attain perfect bliss, I will enter the children’s library, and never need
to leave it. Not even to eat my sandwiches in the parking lot.
The children’s section was on the left closest to the tall gothic windows. The easiest books were
on the bottom. Since I could already read, I knew I should choose books on higher shelves, the
harder books. That would show I was smarter than other kids my age. I realize now this was
evidence I knew the concept of competition and its consequences of either pride or shame. In
my family, anything easy was not worth doing. But here, I was allowed to choose for myself
and whatever was within those books would remain private.
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My first library gave me the freedom to exist in private, to choose and even be greedy. I took
10 books the first time — illustrated books, fables, fairy tales and happy stories of white
children and their kind parents. A week later, now initiated, I was allowed to walk to the
library by myself, carrying the 10 books I had finished reading, knowing I could choose many
more to furnish my vast secret room, my imagination, all mine.
No matter what time of the day, the Medgar Evers Library smells like damp carpet and sugar
cane. There is a dusty little bowl of chewy, sugary orange slices at the librarian’s desk next to a
sign that says “Just Say No.”
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To Mama and other grown folks in Jackson, Miss., libraries are training grounds. I train at
home, where books line the wall. I train in the massive library on the campus of Jackson State
University while Mama teaches political science classes. I train in a tiny library held up by
cinderblocks at Holy Family Catholic School.
Compared to the libraries I usually train in, Medgar Evers is bare, but the prominently
displayed books there are written by black authors.
There is a small section in the library focused on the work of Langston Hughes.
Mama thinks I’ve read every word of the books she assigns. The truth is that I’ve never read
any book cover to cover except “Anansi the Spider.” Today, while I spread out on the floor next
to the Highlight magazines, I read a book called “Langston Hughes: Poet of His People” cover
to cover.
For the first time in my life, I am not rushing to turn a page. I reread passages I don’t
understand. I reread passages I understand far too well. I check the book out so I can reread it
when I get home.
Mama asks what I read when I get in the car. “Something that makes me good,” I tell her.
“Something that makes me feel good.”
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Seven years ago, I gave a reading at the main library. They served mint tea and baklava. Most
of my book tour happened in bookstores, but in Fort Lauderdale the Borders had shuttered
and the indies had dwindled away. So the library had stepped in to reclaim the town’s literary
identity. Here were workshops and author appearances; each year they sponsored a book
festival.
The downtown building stands near the railroad tracks that divide Florida’s east coast into
economic and racial partitions. It attracts travelers, nomads, refugees from both sides of the
tracks.
A few years after that first reading, my daughter and I met up on the library steps with some
other parents and children. We were tired and hot, happy to get into air-conditioning.
There were the usual enticements — books of course, and computers, toys and a chess set of
child-size pieces. Then we heard the library had a moon rock on display.
We searched the library’s several floors before spotting a display. The rock was small, gray
and unassuming.
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But at bedtime that evening I reminded my daughter, “Just think, our library holds part of the
moon.”
Wonder moved through her face; she nodded gravely. “Let’s go back tomorrow.”
When you hear “Fort Lauderdale,” literature might not be the first thing that springs to mind.
In this land of tanned bodies and Jell-O shots, the library whispers. Free of charge, it offers us
the weight of starlight, the light of the moon and the music of uninterrupted imagination.
That summer, after four weeks of rain, the New Haven River overflowed its banks and flooded
the library. Five feet of water poured in, destroying 80 percent of the collection and every
single children’s book that wasn’t checked out, because those books were on the lowest
shelves. The next day, as my neighbors piled the waterlogged books to be pulped, some were
weeping.
I’ll always recall the sadness of life without a library. My daughter was 4 years old then, and a
big part of our routine was walking there together and picking out books. I wasn’t alone. The
whole village had PTSD, because a library is one of the only parts of a community that are
comfortably multigenerational. There are children’s story hours and seniors doing yoga and
middle school kids working on class projects.
But I also remember how, once the shock of the loss was behind us, we built a new library —
with help from people across America. Readers in 38 states mailed us money. Others drove to
Vermont from as far away as Pennsylvania with their cars packed with books. We didn’t ask
for that: Strangers simply felt our pain and wanted to do something. Within two years, we had
a spanking new library.
This summer I was chatting with Deborah Lundbech, the director of the community library in
New Haven, Vt. “One of my greatest joys is connecting a reader with a book,” Lundbech told
me. “The other day, we had an 11-year-old girl in here who was so excited that we had books
five and six in the series she was reading.”
No one will confuse Vermont libraries with the New York Public Library, with its stone lions
and 55 million catalog items. But they matter, even the ones the size of a living room. It’s not
merely that libraries connect us to books. It’s that they connect us to one another.
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The Carnegie director, Melody Sky Eisler, is one of the new-style extrovert librarians:
gregarious and welcoming. Studying art in Egypt years ago she had a visceral shock in the
Bibliotheca Alexandrina. In the Snohetta-designed architectural showpiece she asked about an
empty niche and learned it was a memorial space where the ancient scrolls would have gone.
She was moved by the power of a library that could still reverberate its value 2,000 years after
it was destroyed — so moved she shifted her studies from art to library science.
The muscular Port Townsend library is nonstop busy from opening to the last exit of the day,
checking out not only books, but craft kits, movies, magazines, music DVDs. It seems most of
Port Townsend’s population daily courses through the building. Like other libraries it is also a
pass-through place for transients. But upstairs the beautiful and calm old reading room
remains as it was a hundred years ago.
One reason for the library’s success is the town’s population. A characteristic of Port Townsend
is citizen involvement in hundreds of volunteer projects from maritime science to the kinetic
sculpture race. The library is beloved and although there is a staff of more than 15 people what
makes the place efficient and engaging are the more than 70 volunteers. But Ms. Eisler’s
personal commitment to libraries is more than her affection for the community. She believes
and says “librarians live and die by First Amendment rights.”
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It Made Me a Novelist
When I was 27, I decided I wanted to write a novel. I was in graduate school in Orange County,
Calif., and had been writing short stories happily, but the idea of Page 1 out of 300 struck terror
in me. I needed a way not to give up, so I decided to write five to 10 pages a day until I had a
draft. This kept me moving, which I doubt I would have done otherwise. But there was another
magical piece: the Newport Beach Public Library.
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Each morning I packed up my laptop and some snacks and left the distraction of home (dishes,
sweeping, telephone) and nested myself near the library’s big windows. I looked out at a
scrubby hill full of rabbit holes behind the building (a comforting and very un-Orange County
sight) and I tried to do this impossible-seeming thing, this making something out of nothing.
I remember embarking on a scene in which the parents of three children announce that they
will be adopting out their daughter to her aunt and uncle. I felt so stuck. What would a
character say on a night like that? And furthermore, why did I think I could write a novel?
I looked at the hillside, at the woman in the next carrel sneak-eating Starburst. I looked at the
stacks and stacks of books. Each of those thousands — millions? — of pages were made by a
person who had never written that page before. Each one was a magic trick, some alchemical
reaction between knowledge, belief and invention. I turned my attention from the library back
to my screen and found a voice for that scene. One page and then the next.
After six weeks I had a draft. It was a mess, but it was alive. When I left my carrel that last day
I gave the window a high-five. The library and I had done this together.
The most imposing buildings in town were the Baptist church, the Methodist church and the
Carnegie Library. You couldn’t call the library beautiful, but it rose above Main Street
handsome and tall, all planes and angles, lacking ornamentation. The library’s dominant
feature was the entry — 15 steep, aspirational steps that narrowed as they climbed to a portico
sheltering heavy wooden double doors. Inside, a half-dozen more steps, wooden and creaky,
delivered you into one big hushed room with high windows and dark wood floors and
bookshelves lining all four walls.
The children’s section began on the left, and over the years as I grew up in that town, I read
my way around the shelves. Many of the books may have been there from the beginning, since
World War I. As a young teenager I checked out an ancient etiquette book that included
guidance on how a gentleman used a handkerchief in public. A couple of years later I read Ian
Fleming and Booth Tarkington as if they were contemporaries. Somewhere along the way, I
read the greatest book ever written, “Around the World on a Bicycle.” Eventually, at 16, I
circled all the way back to the right side of the entry stairs where I found such treasures as
“The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” and “Kon-Tiki.”
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But mostly I remember how that climb up the steps to the big silent room made checking out a
book an act of consequence, made reading a moral choice. The structure itself expected
something from you.
All of my projects required a great deal of research. I kept a file of pictures clipped from
magazines and newspapers, but when I needed a reference for something specific, I would hop
on the train to Grand Central Terminal and walk to the New York Public Library on 42nd
Street and Fifth Avenue. It was magical to browse its vast picture collection, but I discovered
that I had another great source at my fingertips.
The Croton Free Library, located in a quiet corner of town and bordering the cemetery where
the playwright and writer Lorraine Hansberry is buried, was just 10 minutes from my house.
Over the next 48 years, this small library would play a role in almost all of my projects,
becoming one of the building blocks of my creative process. The librarians assisted in my
always urgent research requests, put up with late returns, and combed the shelves for books
once borrowed and now needed again with only a vague description to go on: “It was large,
the cover blue or maybe green. You know, the one on African-American folklore.”
The Croton Free Library has shaped the content of my work. It is more than a research bank;
it’s a muse. On days when the wheels on my creative engine refuse to turn, I’ll leave my studio
and make the short drive to my library for regeneration and inspiration. And when I walk
through the doors, I am always greeted with: “Hey, Jerry. What are you working on now?”
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A version of this article appears in print on Oct. 21, 2018, on Page 16 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: In Praise of Libraries
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