Still loving the library, after all this time

I still can't believe we live in a society where you can just walk into a public building and take away books that will entertain and educate you, and it's all free and actively encouraged. 

Libraries fucking rule, and anybody who ever says they should be defunded or closed down or anything like that is a barbaric monster who should be run out of town.

At one point in my life, I lived in five different towns cities over 10 years (because there's always a time like that in your life, when you're literally trying to find your place in the world). And the one thing they all had in common - other than being located on the South Island - is that the first thing I did when I rolled up to a new town was get myself a library card and see what they had to offer.

Okay, maybe get a place to live and getting power and water and things like that hooked up was fairly important, but after those essentials, the library was always the very next stop.

I have been astonished by libraries since I was a little kid, and still can't believe how fucking wonderful they are. Starting with the Doctor Who books by Terrence Dicks and working my way away from there, I drained the locals when I was growing up, devouring hundreds and hundreds of novels and reference books. There probably wasn't a single point in my childhood when I had less than half a dozen books on loan.

In later years, I never came close to touching the sides of the books on offer at the Dunedin and Christchurch central libraries, but hoovered up everything interesting at the Blenheim library in less than two years.

Now I've been in the country's biggest city for close to 15 years, and must have borrowed thousands of books from there over that time and it has become my primary source for new comics in that time. Which would have blown my mind when I was a kid, and the only graphic novels any library had were an extensive Tintin and Asterix collection, as well as the inevitable Fungus The Bogeyman. (Finding something like Gaiman/McKean's Signal to Noise in the Timaru library in the early 90s was a pleasant shock.)

But in the past decade or two, graphic novel collections have really become a thing at even the smallest libraries, and I'm still getting new books out literally every week.

I have changed my library habits drastically in the past few years. I was once adamant that I would never reserve books unless absolutely necessary, relying on the randomness of the shelf, because that's half the fun. 

But that all changed over the Covid lockdowns and couldn't go into the buildings, and I fell into the habit of reserving everything interesting that came through on the system. Now I have the library's latest releases page bookmarked on my phone, and can see every single book that comes into a library system servicing almost two millions people, and have it sent to my local in the centre of town.

It's a new way for me to interact with the library, and sometimes sees me inundated in books that all become avaialble at once - I have something like 42 books on hold right now - but it's still tapping into one of the oldest thrills I know: getting to read new books for free. 

God bless all libraries everywhere, and I'll see you if I ever move to your town.