💾 Archived View for axxuy.xyz › posts › 2024 › librariesthecatch.gmi captured on 2024-08-18 at 17:23:34. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Public libraries are great and I love them[1]. I can choose books there much more freely than my budget allows me to at bookstores. But they are, alas, not perfect. They're fine for the shorter books; I've checked out many books of short stories or poems and some of the breezier nonfiction. But I stay away from the big books, even the ones I would like to read. The trouble of course is that you do have to bring the books back, and sooner than later. I feel cramped by the due dates. I hate to say it, but libraries just aren't a good fit for those big, dense, chewy books. The books that you need to take a lot of time with, the looks that you want to take a lot of time with.
There are also, for me, many different paces of reading a book. Despite my internet-addled attention span, There are still some books that I can plow through in a single day, or that I have to ration out chapters from to avoid doing so (the most recent one was Legends and Lattes by Travis Baldree). Some books are plenty engaging but without quite being page turners; a chapter a day habit is quite easy to keep up with these. And then there's books, which, while not necessarily boring, do take some active effort to stay engaged with. Those are for obvious reasons, slow going, and that's where being on a time limit really hurts.
Oh well, nothing's perfect. And the library is still invaluable for those books it is suited for.