Quiet Please!

I was reading a new novel the other day, "Genesis" by Poul Anderson, and a main character, Laurinda, considers why she reads in a time of great technological advancement. Though it wasn't mentioned, I inferred that she read real books rather than computerized, or electronic, ones. Naturally, that set me to thinking about why I read physical books rather than electronic ones.

I have tried to read online. There is an amazing amount of literature available to anyone, free of charge. The Gutenberg Project has over 27000 books free to read, free to download in eBook form or in other forms for other electronic devices. It is a huge electronic library, available to all. And they are not alone. Many other sources are out there.

But I never get more than a few "pages" into anything available online. I am at a loss when I cannot hold a book in my hands, feel the pages as I turn them. I must see and feel the printed page in order to immerse myself in the book. I am not sure how Laurinda reads, I only know how I must.

Fortunately for me (and for the most lovely Faye who reads much more than I do), there is a library cooperative in our little town. They share resources with three other libraries in nearby cities. We can look up whatever is available and put a request in for it. If our local library has it, a hold will be put on it. If it is available at another, it will be sent to our local library and we will be notified (by a human being calling on the phone!) when it arrives. This was never available to me when I was growing up.

As a boy, libraries were huge, forbidding places unless they were in my school. Even there, they were places with extra rules about quiet and decorum. Yet, they were also places where almost anything could be learned without having to wait for a teacher to speak it, to write it on a blackboard, to conduct some kind of exercise and for it to come up in the lesson plans. A library was unfettered learning, limited only by my own curiosity's boundaries, by which I mean no limits at all.

A book is a magical thing. It unleashes your imagination by paradoxically tying it to the author's. You soar through space to distant galaxies, wander under the earth or seas, fly over mountains and plains, travel back into history or forward into the future. But I cannot do any of that unless I can hold the bundle of paper in my own hands. It isn't real to me until then. It's like the words don't just come into my brain through my eyes but also get absorbed through my fingertips.

If you have a library available to you, use it. If you can, volunteer to help out (they will undoubtedly appreciate it). Support it in any way you can. Take your children to one, take your grandchildren to one, encourage others to explore the ones in your area.