I have had a life-long love affair with public libraries. We go through our rough patches. I get busy and neglectful. The libraries can be of varying quality. But in the end, it seems, I am destined to come back again and again to how amazing it is that I can, for free, walk into a building full of books, pick one, remove it from the shelf, take it home, and lose myself for hours. My weekend productivity is way down. My practicing suffers. Perhaps it's not the healthiest of relationships. It's admittedly a little one sided, and, for my part, borders on obsessive. At long last, I recently joined Goodreads. I haven't gotten much into writing my own reviews, but I've gotten a lot of excellent recommendations from friends and strangers by looking at what other people are reading. Those people who do write reviews are more often than not thoughtful and engaging in their commentary. Such a refreshing change of pace from the internet at large. My library branch here isn't huge. For its size, it has a pretty impressive fiction section, but the real magic is that I haven't found a book yet that the Austin Public Library system won't send winging my way just because I requested it on a whim. Look, I know none of this is news. But in this day and age, I feel like it bears repeating that public libraries are fantastic. Do I still buy books sometimes? Of course. Do I support Amazon in doing so? Yes, sometimes. But I'm never going to plunk down the money represented by the number of books I read from the public library any more than I would buy every single show I watch on Netflix or Hulu. And the books have the benefit of being available to me for free, and free of advertising. Can I stress enough how cool this is?
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