Borrowing books

Walking around the library this afternoon I was thinking how much I will miss the library when I am not here. Is there a crazier thought than that one?  How can you miss something if you are not here?  Read dead for not here.  You know, permanently gone.

I marshalled my thoughts into better order and moved to the idea of how wonderful it has been to be able to access to this library and its shelves of books over the years I have lived in the neighborhood.  Every shelf holds a door to other worlds whether they are practicalities, fiction, non-fiction, how do things, knitting, travel, cookery and any other subject you could care to think about.

I have no idea how many books I have borrowed in the years I have been a member of this library but I’m in no doubt it would run well into the hundreds.

When I first joined, I read methodically along the shelves in alphabetical order, choosing a book to read from each shelf which introduced me to different authors and in all this time I used this method I have never progressed beyond the first half of the alphabet before being side-tracked by some other happening in my life.  This method was abandoned quite some time back and these days I fall back on my not inconsiderable cache of A4 pages pasted all over with reviews from book sellers,  book reviews from daily papers and names and authors scribbled down on scraps of paper. 

I have absolutely no hope of reading all those either but I wouldn’t want to be left with time on my hands and no idea which book I should read next.