Back before Google and Siri, when we had a question we needed—or simply wanted—answered, where did we go? What did we do?
If we had an encyclopedia at home, we sometimes had to go no further. But not everyone owned a set of encyclopedias, and not every question was answerable by looking it up in that venerable collection of volumes.
In that case, there was a place to go where, often with the assistance of a friendly research librarian, we could get most of our questions answered. Yes, of course I’m talking about the library. There we could not only get most of our questions answered but, oh heck, while we were there, it always seemed we might as well borrow a few books!
It was at the library that I first learned that plays were publisshed in book form for anyone to read…and I did. Voraciously. Being an audial rather than a visual person, I didn’t see the scenes in the play unfolding in my mind as I read, but the dialogue resonated loudly with me.
I didn’t borrow only plays, however. I borrowed books of poems, fiction, and nonfiction of many sorts. Then, as now, I preferred nonfiction over fiction, and then as now my favorite form of nonfiction was humor. I don’t mean joke books; I mean books by such humorists of the day as Benchley and Leacock. Later on I got hooked on Kerr, Bombeck, Grizzard, and Barry, but they weren’t around in my childhood.
And even later, when I turned to not just reading books but writing them, I penned a few humorous books of my own. Reading Kerr and Bombeck, while reflecting on how different my life was from theirs, inspired me to write Life Behind the Office. Unlike Kerr and Bombeck, I didn’t have three kids, a husband, a suburban house, and green grass growing over the septic tank. At a comparable time in my life I had one child, an ex-husband, and I lived in a ginormous professional-and-living city apartment, fully half of which was given over to office space for the business I was running at the time. (Hence the title: Life Behind the Office.)
But—as usual—I have digressed. I was talking about the variety of books to be found in the library.
The library was like a smorgasbord table: loaded down with a huge assortment of wonderful offerings, from which I could sample to my heart’s content. It was there that I discovered the humorists and the plays, as well as other types of books I might never have known about otherwise. And it was in the school library, rather than the public library, that I discovered a series of history books that made what I had always thought a terribly boring subject come alive and grab my interest. I’m still no history buff, but I enjoyed the heck out of that series, each book of which dealt with a different decade.
So the library not only afforded me an opportunity to borrow and read books I didn’t own and might otherwise never have gotten to know, but it gave me a chance to learn about different kinds of books—plays, poems, humor, and more—that I might never have owned or read or in some cases even known about.
What’s the message here? Browse the stacks at your local library and, in your reading and in your online book-ordering, push aside the constraints of what you normally read and try a different type of book. If you mostly read fiction, try some nonfiction for a change. If you mostly read romances, try mysteries. If you mostly read history, try inspirationals or motivationals. If you mostly read how-tos, or parenting books, try religious books or poetry. Diversify. Enlarge your boundaries. Spread your wings.
Whether you do your book ordering online at the websites of various publishers, or on Amazon.com, or wherever, you now know where a good place is to look around for new topics, new genres, new interests in reading….
At the library.