Love Your Library

A new blog post from @bookishbeck reminded me this morning that #loveyourlibrary day was on the 20th of October, and I realised that I had actually used my local library last week after I finally unpacked all of my books and decided, naturally, that I needed more of them. It seemed like a good time to blog about my library use, since it’s why I’m here today.

I was brought up in a small rural town in the North of Ireland, just a couple of miles from the border. As the demographic of the town was largely Irish/Catholic/nationalist, we suffered in terms of services and employment because of discrimination and chronic lack of investment. The partition of Ireland had been, and is, a catastrophe for the people who lived in the border region. From this you had the constant rumblings of the on-going conflict in the background, and occasionally, brutally, the foreground. But although it was a tough place to grow up in at times, from my own perspective we were much loved and what we had we cherished.

My parents were both readers and introduced me to the library at a young age. The previous building, a beautiful old market house, had been blown up in 1972, the year before I was born. The new library was a small two story building and provided me with one of my earliest memories - an upstairs children’s section. Little red plastic seats and best of all, shelves of books.

There was a great community spirit where I grew and people looked after one another. The parents worked hard with sports clubs, marching bands and festivals to give the younger people outlets, especially with all that was going on. I had many friends and we loved playing amongst the drumlins and rolling fields that surrounded the town. But when I wasn’t playing, or we were enjoying some of our famously inclement Irish weather, there was only one place for me – the library.

The two ladies behind the counter, Frances and Vera, would often find me outside the library when they were opening up during the school summer holidays. And they’d be jangling those same keys, waiting to lock up when I returned the same evening, to replace those titles I had read during the day.

I was a voracious reader. My primary three teacher used to send me into the classes of the older age groups, as I’d exhausted the library. I was soon pouring over the primary seven shelves. I couldn’t get enough. I ate and breathed books. There was also a quarterly book club, where parents could order titles for kids via a small magazine. I’d plague my parents and literally be shaking with anticipation when the principal knocked on the class door to deliver the cardboard box of new books. I just couldn’t wait to hold it, see the cover and then consume it.

The library was also a great source for music cassettes, especially moving into my teenage years. Stephen King became a favourites and remains so. Fiction was my first love but I was also raiding other sections –I soon came to explore the roots of the conflict and Irish history. With British soldiers on the streets pointing their guns at me as I walked up the street to the library with my bag of swinging books, it felt necessary to know what they were doing here. I could go back 800 hundred years. We knew of the injustices and atrocities that surrounded us, but I needed a deeper context.

We were surrounded by a lot of trauma and suffering back then and as a shy bookish child I suffered from a lot of social anxiety, and discovered meditation techniques through books in the self help section. This has lead to a lifetime interest in mindfulness and meditation.

Of course I left the town for pastures new. University first, where having a well stocked shelf of Kerouac, Bukowski, Henry Miller and dog eared poetry anthologies was crucial to undergraduate street cred. I now began to look at books as things, objects to keep. My library attendance faltered and I spent my spare pennies in the second hand bookshops of Belfast. Eventually I moved to Dublin, flitting between flats. Boxes of books followed me, and sometimes didn’t. I’ve probably lost as many books as I’ve owned.

Eventually I moved back to my home town. Sometimes when you get lost, it’s best to retrace your steps, and that’s where I found myself. I rejoined the local library after a fifteen year hiatus. Just before I had left it had moved and was now housed in a much more spacious building, open planned with lots of natural light streaming in. There were computers now and a beautiful kids section, great resources for the local community.

With kindle and amazon, I probably didn’t use the library as much as I did in the past but I tried as often as possible. The libby app has become a great favourite, as has the ability to order books. The library opening hours have been cut as much as 30% from when I was a child and the constant pressure of austerity forces them into slashing their budgets even more. If the Tory government had their way, they’d close them altogether. In this age of neo liberalism, nothing seems to have any worth unless it is making money.

Libraries are the opposite of that. They provide a safe space for children and teenagers to access resources they might not have at home. People searching for jobs can check the local papers and use the computers for applications. I know during the pandemic how delighted my elderly mother was when the library re-opened, just for collections. The librarian knew the type of authors she liked and would have a stack ready for her to choose from. A small joy in the middle of a miserable time for all of us, but especially so for the isolated and older members of our communities who value their libraries as a local hub. Collecting books might be the only social contact some people have during their days. It’s tough out there.

Libraries nurture dreams. They allow us to see the world with all its myriad of possibilities, to see beyond our borders. We can imagine much richer kingdoms and see ourselves in them. George R Martin said the reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads leads only one. I know this to be true.

I’ve moved again now, and have connected with my new local library. I know it from before because I studied in this same town for a couple of years. I discovered the poetry of Heaney and the music of Tom waits, amongst hundreds of other influences.

After buying new shelves and unboxing my books, I’ve realised how many of them I’ve collected because I love them as objects. And I’ll always have well stacked, heaving bookshelves. But I’m going to rotate them. There’s lots of books I can give away – charity shops and bookcrossing. And I’m going to use my library more.

I ordered Jonathan Frantzen’s new book ‘Crossroads’ on Saturday last. I got a message to collect it, so in I went only five days later. New copy for the fifty pence loan fee. I also had a nice chat with the lovely librarian about ‘The corrections’, the last one of his we both had read. You don’t get that when you hit click on amazon for a £14.99 new hardback or another title disappears into your expanding kindle library.

I honestly don’t believe I would have a book blog, or started a bookclub ten years ago, if my parents hadn’t brought me to the library. I loved the escapism, but it also became about the pleasures of fiction and accessing and learning about the world I then found myself in. I love all libraries.

‘Libraries gave us power, then work came and made us free’ sang the manic street preachers.

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