With a brand new library membership under my belt I've become a reading machine. Libraries should have a loyalty system don't you think? The books are free, so there'd be no point in borrowing 10, get the 11th one free... but a complimentary coffee wouldn't go astray. Librarians, think about it. That's all I'm saying. A soy chai latte once in a while might improve the borrower demographic.
It takes a shift in mental gears for me to borrow books from a library. When I read a book and enjoy it... I don't want to give it back. (One of the reasons why I also try not to borrow books from friends.) However, the flipside of all this is that I've discovered that a library card is like a license to read stuff that I wouldn't normally fork over dosh for. There are few things more painful in this world than watching me shop for a new book to read when I'm skint. Weighing up the cheapness of this paperback versus that one, reading the first few pages, trying to ensure I get the best bang for my buck from the cheaper paperbacks when what I really want to do is buy the new China Mieville novel just out in hardback... a mere snip at $54.00 sigh
In the past few weeks I have read (in no particular order); a monograph on architect Buckminster Fuller (some of his work was a bit odd), "Murder Most Fab" by Julian Clary (fun!), a book on 'natural' architecture (interesting), a knitting book (useful), "The Vintner's Luck" by Elizabeth Knox (very engaging, and both a sequel and a movie have just been released), a Tudor era crime novel "Dark Fire" by C J Sansom (not the best in the series, but not bad), a re-read of my own copy of Julian Clary's autobiography "A Young Man's Passage" (both a hoot and poignant), a book of 50s fashions, a monograph on Coco Chanel... and some others I have blanked already.
Surely that's got to be worth a free espresso?
4 comments:
I'd give you a chai latte just for mentioning China Mieville.
We love the China!
As a boy, I loved going to the library. So many books; so little time.
My father still loves to go to the library, find a book and sit a read away an afternoon.
I have not been to a modern library in a long while. I'd be curious to see how different they are nowadays. Probably full of computers and people talking too loudly and not many books anymore.
as a library worker i can gurantee that the coffee stand would be a wonderful idea, but would always be busy as hell as the staff would be drinking it like water.. lol
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