library card

I am now the proud owner of a library card for our town's public library! There's something very grounding about belonging to a community project of such magnitude; it almost makes me feel as though I'm contributing to the disbursement of knowledge into the community. Even though my entire childhood was punctuated by library visits, it still makes me feel like a grown-up to have a library card. (Are they always bright yellow?)

I got my first library card at age 3-1/2. The rule was that you had to be able to write your own name to have a card, and I worked hard at it, with the pencil wobbling in my unsteady toddler's hand. The librarian looked on in disbelief as I painstakingly wrote my first and last names in the little white box. That same proudly scrawled piece was my entrance ticket to worlds of fantasy and fiction, chaos and fractals, astronomy and baseball and robots and whichever topic I happened to be enthused about in any given month. Library visits were the highlights of my week, and I read my way (non-systematically) through the majority of the shelves in our little public library.

Mom used the library as object lessons in public behavior (you better believe we used our "library voices"), responsibility (no late fees for this girl!), computer technology (such as it was in the 1980's) and just plain love of books. I will be forever grateful to my parents for instilling that love in me and nurturing it and never, ever saying no to a library visit. The library wasn't a privilege in our household; it was bread and butter. I remember my childhood full of precarious stacks of books piled high on the nightstand, in the bookshelves, on the bathroom vanity, next to the couch. The TV came on twice a day: for Sesame Street and the news. But books were constant companions. I remember reading while I hung upside-down from the jungle gym, while I rode my bike around the block (that was less of a success story, though), while we took the dogs for a walk.

Part of the reason I constantly got lost after I got my driver's license (and ever since...) was that I spent the majority of my childhood car time with my nose stuck in a book. Who cared about turning left or turning right when the Five Little Peppers were growing and Meg was learning to tesser and Mr. Popper's penguins were overheating?

If I think about it, I could tell you which books I was reading during just about any period of my life. The more intense my life was, the more clearly I remember which of my literary friends were accompanying me on the journey. My tastes have ranged broadly over the years, always returning to my classics to touch base and then venturing forth into uncharted waters.

Lately, I have had a pretty intense interest in audio books, stemming from my new job circumstances which require me to become up close and personal with several of our country's major interstates on a regular basis. My experience with an audio book is not at all similar to my experience with the written word. In a book, your eyes can roam, you can take in the story in nonlinear chunks and create your own structure. An audio book is relentlessly linear, telling the story exactly how the author intended (sometimes with the added bonus of his or her own voice doing the telling). It's a new, but not altogether unpleasant, experience.

I think I'm gonna have fun with this!

The first four audio books:

Harry Potter und der Feuerkelch (in process)
Prodigal Summer (read by Barbara Kingsolver herself! Much excitement!)
Good Harbor by Anita Diamant, read by Linda Emond
Artemis Fowl: The Eternity Code by Eoin Colfer, read by Nathaniel Parker