I Don't Need No Liberry

I've just heard that the mayor of Oakland is considering closing a passel of local libraries, including the one that my family frequents, in order to close our $58 million deficit. To which I say, Huzzah! Who needs libraries anyways?

I mean, what American taxpayer even reads books anymore? They're outmoded. The Google search bar can find any information that anyone with a computer or a smartphone or an iPad needs - and that's virtually everyone. ( I mean, it's not as though there are huge swaths of people in this country who struggle to pay for rent or food, let alone broadband access, these days.)  Why bother losing yourself for 72 straight hours in "The Josephine Bonaparte Trilogy" by Sandra Gulland when you can just type "Who was Josephine Bonaparte" into a search engine? It's much more efficient, and prevents you from delving into messy and unwanted French and Caribbean history, not to mention spares you from envisioning dead people as living, breathing beings whose lives influenced the course of history.

We all know that every single piece of knowledge in the world has been digitized by now, and if it's on the Internet it's true. So the argument that librarians can help separate the wheat from the information chaff is a false construct, meant to preserve jobs. Did you know that public librarians earn, on average, $350,000 each year and get summers off and get free massages? It's true, I read it on www.utterflamingnonsense.com, which seems like a very credible site. No wonder we're falling into the ocean, public debt-wise. Stop blaming the corporate titans and their wonder-bonuses; it's those fat cat librarians.

Speaking of public debt, how about we start making those giant, cushy, cavernous public libraries finally pay their own way? The American way is about earning money, not about lending things out for free. Ditch the books and put in some retail, that's my advice. A couple of shops, a few fast food restaurants, a nail salon, maybe a gaming arcade where the kids can hang out.

By converting libraries into malls, we'd head off the naysayers who see public libraries as "community centers." Come on. What kid wants to visit at a quiet library to do homework and check out a new novel or how-to book about science, when the alternative is to roam a mall with his friends? For the parents who bring their young kids by for story time and crafts,  I say: check out the kids' channels on cable TV and park your youngsters there. 

And as for the people who come to the library to meet with English language tutors and take citizenship classes so that they can take part in our representative democracy, well, you can probably guess where I think they could go instead. 

Look, if you need any further proof that libraries don't matter, take a look at me. Why, I haven't willingly set foot in a library or cracked a book since Aristonphanes Middle School, and I turned out just fine.

P.S. If this post makes you mad, good. Click on http://saveoaklandlibrary.org/, or look for a similar organization defending the role of public libraries in your neck of the woods, and take action!

And Refereeing the Match: Holly Hobbie

I grew up in a house overflowing with a love of reading. What it didn't overflow with was books.

Why would anyone buy books? We had all the books we could possibly read from the Brighton Town Library. My mother, an elementary school teacher, made sure of it. On Wednesday while we were at school, at the spots on the dining room table where my siblings and I each stacked lunchboxes, permission slips, homework folders, etc., my mother would leave a fresh stack of library books that she'd selected for us that day, topped with a candy bar. No wonder I've always considered reading to be so sweet.

Because of Mom's devotion to the library (my dad was and continues to be a one-book-a-year guy, but he never falls short of that goal) my parents didn't own a lot of books and rarely bought them for the kids. That the one bookshelf in our family room held a hard-bound first edition of To Kill A Mockingbird told me more about the social import of that book than any review.

Maybe it felt like an act of rebellion to buy books.  All I know is that as I got older, I couldn't stop buying them, getting my new treasures home to slap them with a Holly Hobbie book plate and give them a rating. (Nancy Drew's Moonstone Castle Mystery: 9. Very Good.)

Now I live in a house with so many books that they are found on the ping pong table, on the back of the toilet, and underneath couches. We buy books at our local bookstore, from the Scholastic book sale, at airports and at readings. I have spent serious time thinking about how we could glue books together to make furniture, like this guy does. 

It's fair to say that I treasure books as artifacts, especially having written a novel that now lives in a drawer. Every one of them represents the author's triumph over resistance, over doubt, over fear. (Ok, maybe not Snooki's debut novel.) I want to support both the authors who have made it through the fire of creation, and the bookstores who care about the words on the page. Particularly in the perilous world that is modern publishing and small business ownership, I try to put my money where my mouth is. So I spend a lot of money on books.

Then I think about the librarians. I've worked with, for, and around librarians for a huge chunk of my professional life, and hold them in the highest regard. Savvy about finding and using information and invariably interested in all sorts of things I've never even heard of, librarians sometimes seem like the Key Masters of the Universe. Whether it's a corporate librarian who can reel off the names of six different data sources for researching Chinese private company data, or the children's librarian at the Montclair Library who can run an after school art event and recommend YA literature simultaneously, they either have the answers or can tell you where to find them. Libraries are also big buyers of new books.

But of course library budgets, public and private, are always under pressure. How do you show that libraries and their staff matter? By using them, frequently, like my mom. Taking out tons of books to read, every week.

But I don't need to go to the library if I'm buying the book.

Sister! Daughter! Sister! Daughter!

Here are some alternatives I've considered:

1. Buy the book and then  borrow it again from the library, just on principle

2.  Forgo buying the book in favor of checking it out of the library (also more environmentally friendly) and then send the author a thank you note and a check for 9% of the cover price (which is about what they see)

3. Read Snooki's book and gouge out my eyes so I never have to read again.

I don't know what the answer is. If I start thinking about how Kindles and Nooks figure in I get a twitch in my eye. I never in my life thought I'd have to pit authors against librarians in an existential Celebrity Death Match in my head.

Honestly, hasn't anyone written a book on this subject yet?