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| Libraries today are as fast as and more generous than any online bookshop | |
| (about 1 hour later) | |
| I rejoined the library this week, five years after my membership lapsed and without any great expectation I would use it. The public library is the only thing in my neighbourhood that is free, and it looks that way: dowdy, with grey carpet, half-empty fiction shelves and a librarian who is not in the business of wishing anyone a nice day. When you listen closely, the silence of the reading room is actually white noise produced by half a dozen nervous people rustling in their seats. | I rejoined the library this week, five years after my membership lapsed and without any great expectation I would use it. The public library is the only thing in my neighbourhood that is free, and it looks that way: dowdy, with grey carpet, half-empty fiction shelves and a librarian who is not in the business of wishing anyone a nice day. When you listen closely, the silence of the reading room is actually white noise produced by half a dozen nervous people rustling in their seats. |
| I’d forgotten about the effect of all of this, how wonderfully and militantly library culture stands out against every other service in the neighbourhood; how mind-blowing it is to walk into a place and not be beamed at by a maniac or asked to take part in a commercial transaction. | I’d forgotten about the effect of all of this, how wonderfully and militantly library culture stands out against every other service in the neighbourhood; how mind-blowing it is to walk into a place and not be beamed at by a maniac or asked to take part in a commercial transaction. |
| The downside to the library, one that Amazon and its ilk have capitalised on for years, has always been the inconvenience. It is easier to order and pay for a book online than to trek to your local branch only to find the book you want isn’t there. (If you’re insane, which a fair number of people who live around here are, there’s another downside, which is hygiene. I know mothers in Manhattan who won’t take out library books for their kids because of the risk of catching “germs”, or “bed bugs” from the circulating collection.) | The downside to the library, one that Amazon and its ilk have capitalised on for years, has always been the inconvenience. It is easier to order and pay for a book online than to trek to your local branch only to find the book you want isn’t there. (If you’re insane, which a fair number of people who live around here are, there’s another downside, which is hygiene. I know mothers in Manhattan who won’t take out library books for their kids because of the risk of catching “germs”, or “bed bugs” from the circulating collection.) |
| It turns out that, during my five-year hiatus, the convenience argument has expired. The New York Public Library system has made it fantastically easy to order any book directly from your computer. There is a phone app, and an app for downloading ebooks. The half-empty shelves are irrelevant given that you can put a hold on any book in the entire New York system and it will be delivered to your branch within days. This week, I went on a half-hysterical borrowing frenzy and ordered Anne Enright’s The Green Road, Karen Joy Fowler’s We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, the new Ted Hughes biography, a book about Chernobyl and Asne Seierstad’s The Angel of Grozny. Then I took my kids to the children’s section upstairs, where there are play mats and huge windows and a librarian who is very cross, all of the time, particularly if you try to feed your child a snack without her seeing. After almost 10 years in New York, I’ve never felt so at home. | It turns out that, during my five-year hiatus, the convenience argument has expired. The New York Public Library system has made it fantastically easy to order any book directly from your computer. There is a phone app, and an app for downloading ebooks. The half-empty shelves are irrelevant given that you can put a hold on any book in the entire New York system and it will be delivered to your branch within days. This week, I went on a half-hysterical borrowing frenzy and ordered Anne Enright’s The Green Road, Karen Joy Fowler’s We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, the new Ted Hughes biography, a book about Chernobyl and Asne Seierstad’s The Angel of Grozny. Then I took my kids to the children’s section upstairs, where there are play mats and huge windows and a librarian who is very cross, all of the time, particularly if you try to feed your child a snack without her seeing. After almost 10 years in New York, I’ve never felt so at home. |
| Shake, rattle and roll | Shake, rattle and roll |
| Related: What do I want for Christmas? To go back to out-of-office time, please | Emma Brockes | Related: What do I want for Christmas? To go back to out-of-office time, please | Emma Brockes |
| When my kids aren’t in the library, they’re at an exorbitantly overpriced indoor play area with no windows, where once a week a guitarist in his 30s runs a music class for babies. He has a drummer and a keyboard player, and together they play covers of Bon Jovi and Aerosmith while the babies ignore them or try to eat bits of carpet. | When my kids aren’t in the library, they’re at an exorbitantly overpriced indoor play area with no windows, where once a week a guitarist in his 30s runs a music class for babies. He has a drummer and a keyboard player, and together they play covers of Bon Jovi and Aerosmith while the babies ignore them or try to eat bits of carpet. |
| I find myself wondering about this man’s interior life, the way one does with children’s entertainers. He isn’t sinister; he’s very nice. He does, however, have a homemade tattoo of the words “love and rage” on the inside of his forearm, which I assume harks from an era when a different kind of music career still beckoned. During a cover of Wonderwall last week, several of the mums sang along, gently swaying to and fro and mouthing the lyrics in a way that made me feel simultaneously very happy and very sad. I saw the guitarist looking at us and for a split second, wondered about the rage part of “love and rage”. The moment passed. | I find myself wondering about this man’s interior life, the way one does with children’s entertainers. He isn’t sinister; he’s very nice. He does, however, have a homemade tattoo of the words “love and rage” on the inside of his forearm, which I assume harks from an era when a different kind of music career still beckoned. During a cover of Wonderwall last week, several of the mums sang along, gently swaying to and fro and mouthing the lyrics in a way that made me feel simultaneously very happy and very sad. I saw the guitarist looking at us and for a split second, wondered about the rage part of “love and rage”. The moment passed. |
| Spring rites and wrongs | Spring rites and wrongs |
| The winter heatwave in New York is finally coming to an end, but not before the whole city turned up in Central Park at the weekend dressed in T-shirts to hang out in the sun. Basing observations about the natural world on the behaviour of random pigeons is, I suspect, the naturalist’s equivalent of a journalist quoting a taxi driver as a test of public opinion, but I’m just saying: the pigeons on my terrace were nesting all week and at the weekend had wild pigeon sex. That has to be because they think it’s spring, right? | The winter heatwave in New York is finally coming to an end, but not before the whole city turned up in Central Park at the weekend dressed in T-shirts to hang out in the sun. Basing observations about the natural world on the behaviour of random pigeons is, I suspect, the naturalist’s equivalent of a journalist quoting a taxi driver as a test of public opinion, but I’m just saying: the pigeons on my terrace were nesting all week and at the weekend had wild pigeon sex. That has to be because they think it’s spring, right? |
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