I am a big fan of libraries. I grew up with one because I was lucky. My father was a bibliophile who was fluent in 25 languages and his library was my favorite place in the entire world. What made me unlucky was that I was a bibliophage from the very moment I could read, often reading a book a day, and while my father had about 15,000 books by the time I was reading, only a small portion of those were in a language I could actually read. Reading was pretty much all I had. My parents were both in the diplomatic service and we moved at least once a year if not every couple of months. We were often in places where getting books in French (or worse, Korean) wasn't possible. I brought along books with me, most of which I'd already read a few times, and I was always begging my father to buy me more.
For at least two months out of the year we returned to France as a family. We usually started with a June trip to Paris and then would take the train down to Marseille to meet my grandparents who would then drive us to their house near Saint-Remy, which was sadly fairly bookless.
My grandmother ran a bed and breakfast for most of my life and sometimes the guests would leave books behind, but the books left behind were not interesting to me. I often read them anyways if I could, but I wanted to read good books, great books. So my grandmother brought me to the library in another town not too far away because the closest town didn't have one.
Madame Martin, the librarian is someone I will always remember fondly. She was like my father when it came to books. She never told me not to read anything, even when I decided I wanted to read Flaubert because my father loved Flaubert even though I would say she probably shouldn't have let me read Madame Bovary at such a tender age, but I suppose it didn't matter because I didn't get the more racy stuff. I just thought Emma was boring and mean, but reading Flaubert? When my father saw I was reading it he spoke to me about Flaubert as if he were a magician and not a writer of books, and when he told me about Flaubert's obsession with le mot juste (the perfect word), it became mine too. I took up the task of learning 5 words a day because I thought in order to find the perfect word one must know all the words to pick the right one.
The other great thing about Madame Martin was that she listened to me. Not like most adults listen to children, but really listened to me as I tried a combination of puppy dog eyes and charm to talk her into letting me take out two more books than I was allowed. She believed me when I said that I would read each and every one of them in the two weeks before I needed to return them. And I did.
When I came back to the library she asked me the usual questions and I told her which ones I liked and which ones I didn't and then she put 7 more books on her desk and checked them out for me. One of the books in that particular pile was C.S. Lewis' "The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe". I loved it. I couldn't believe when two weeks later, after I confessed to having read it three times by staying up late at night and reading in my closet with the light on, she told me there were six more books in the series and if I liked C.S. Lewis then there were many other authors she would introduce me to. It was heaven.
After that summer my father started to take my love of reading more seriously. He made a point to send me books when he was away and we wrote letters about the books he'd sent me to read and books I wanted to read and the books he loved and hated. He made me lists of books I should try to find on my own and read one day. For a little girl who spent most of her time alone (I didn't go to school) and away from her father, reading the books he sent was a way of being with him even when we were apart.
When I went off to the US to attend school properly I didn't speak English. I spent a lot of time in the school library and when I could get permission in the library of the town my school was in because they had books in French. It was in this library that I hid when the kids made fun of my English and my accent and just about every other thing they could, but it didn't matter because I had books and I'd show them!
I spent hours and hours pouring over grammar books and listening to cassette tapes and within a year I spoke English well enough that almost no one could tell it wasn't my native language.
When the kids stopped making fun of me and I had made friends I didn't abandon the library. I had a plan actually. I'd started my reading of the fiction section by pulling the first book on the shelf - Alcott's "Little Women" off the shelf and read it cover to cover and when I was done I went to the next book on the shelf and my plan was to read every book on every shelf from A - Z before I graduated.
But I wasn't in high school long. I tested out of nearly every subject and was taking all my math and science classes at the nearby college who like many others, were recruiting me. How does a girl who has never been to school one day in her life before the past two years test out of high school they asked my parents - who told them I was smart but when they asked me I had a much simpler answer.
One thing I left out about the wonderful Madame Martin whom I loved dearly and kept in touch with until she passed away when I was 25 was that those 7 books she would choose for me every two weeks weren't always books full of adventure and fun, but also books about math and science and history and interesting people who had fascinating lives and did amazing things. And those books, they were my teachers, and now as I try to write a book of my own they continue to teach me.
There are a lot of things being said about why libraries shouldn't be closed and why they should. If you have any doubt that libraries are not important, then I hope my story will, despite that I didn't grow up impoverished with no other access to books, show you their vital place in a world that considers itself "civilized" because it is for those who cannot afford books that libraries must remain open and free and the wonderful places they've been in the past for the sake of the future.
For me personally I look back on my odd childhood and wonder would I have done all the things I accomplished in my life without the books I read as a child, a teenager, and as an adult. Would I have completed my double doctorate from MIT if it hadn't been for a woman in a small French town taking an interest in me? An interest that even my book loving father didn't seem to understand? Obviously reading The Chronicles of Narnia didn't exactly get me into MIT, but it did keep me from being a lonely little girl and gave me the desire to be great. And while there are problems in life that books and libraries can't solve, I look at my own library, 2,000+ books strong and growing at every opportunity and all I hope is that anybody who wants to read a good book can because that's what libraries do. They make books available to everyone.
What Terry Deary said in this article in The Guardian is the kind of drivel I expect to read in The Mail. How any writer would want to deny books to anyone is beyond my comprehension. That he doesn't seem to care how public libraries actually contribute to people buying books when they can afford them just goes to show how out of touch he really is and it's sadder still to me because he writes for children. No, Terry Deary doesn't want to get his 6p for lending his books, for him that is not an investment in the future. He wants the 30p he would get for selling his book in a bookshop, never you mind that being the 10th most borrowed author from libraries means that lots of people are reading his books many among them probably children since that is his genre. No, no. Let's screw the future for 24p.
I hope his greed and poor attitude come back to bite him in the ass. I hope the librarians, who buy his books to make them available in their libraries are more reluctant to do so in the future. I hope that he understands exactly who he has insulted - his readers past and present, librarians and those who help to keep the libraries running, and those who know what the true cost would be if the public library system disappeared forever.
Deary adds, "Books aren't public property, and writers aren't Enid Blyton, middle-class women indulging in a pleasant little hobby. They've got to make a living. Authors, booksellers and publishers need to eat. We don't expect to go to a food library to be fed."
I just wanted to close this post with that so you can see what a fucking idiot he is because his attempt to sound clever is bumbled best in this particular quote though "car libraries" lending "Porsches" also illustrates his true motivations rather well, but the food libraries quote is slightly better at showing just how out of touch he really is because he's not bitching about Amazon (who fucks authors and publishers much more effectively than any library ever could) or how ebooks might be changing the model for book publishing and how that might be having some impact on the industry but rather calling to close libraries because he only makes 6,000 a year. If he feels so strongly, why not just not let your books be sold to libraries? Funny how that isn't mentioned, which means 6,000 a year must be better than nothing.
I'm sure the lovely librarians who in Deary's world would lose their jobs and their incomes can find another author who would happily accept 6,000 pounds a year to be the 10th most borrowed author in British libraries. And I'm even more sure they could find an author more deserving too because I've read a few of his books.
Save libraries people. As Neil Gaiman put it, "don't borrow from the future to pay for today".
For at least two months out of the year we returned to France as a family. We usually started with a June trip to Paris and then would take the train down to Marseille to meet my grandparents who would then drive us to their house near Saint-Remy, which was sadly fairly bookless.
My grandmother ran a bed and breakfast for most of my life and sometimes the guests would leave books behind, but the books left behind were not interesting to me. I often read them anyways if I could, but I wanted to read good books, great books. So my grandmother brought me to the library in another town not too far away because the closest town didn't have one.
Madame Martin, the librarian is someone I will always remember fondly. She was like my father when it came to books. She never told me not to read anything, even when I decided I wanted to read Flaubert because my father loved Flaubert even though I would say she probably shouldn't have let me read Madame Bovary at such a tender age, but I suppose it didn't matter because I didn't get the more racy stuff. I just thought Emma was boring and mean, but reading Flaubert? When my father saw I was reading it he spoke to me about Flaubert as if he were a magician and not a writer of books, and when he told me about Flaubert's obsession with le mot juste (the perfect word), it became mine too. I took up the task of learning 5 words a day because I thought in order to find the perfect word one must know all the words to pick the right one.
The other great thing about Madame Martin was that she listened to me. Not like most adults listen to children, but really listened to me as I tried a combination of puppy dog eyes and charm to talk her into letting me take out two more books than I was allowed. She believed me when I said that I would read each and every one of them in the two weeks before I needed to return them. And I did.
When I came back to the library she asked me the usual questions and I told her which ones I liked and which ones I didn't and then she put 7 more books on her desk and checked them out for me. One of the books in that particular pile was C.S. Lewis' "The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe". I loved it. I couldn't believe when two weeks later, after I confessed to having read it three times by staying up late at night and reading in my closet with the light on, she told me there were six more books in the series and if I liked C.S. Lewis then there were many other authors she would introduce me to. It was heaven.
After that summer my father started to take my love of reading more seriously. He made a point to send me books when he was away and we wrote letters about the books he'd sent me to read and books I wanted to read and the books he loved and hated. He made me lists of books I should try to find on my own and read one day. For a little girl who spent most of her time alone (I didn't go to school) and away from her father, reading the books he sent was a way of being with him even when we were apart.
When I went off to the US to attend school properly I didn't speak English. I spent a lot of time in the school library and when I could get permission in the library of the town my school was in because they had books in French. It was in this library that I hid when the kids made fun of my English and my accent and just about every other thing they could, but it didn't matter because I had books and I'd show them!
I spent hours and hours pouring over grammar books and listening to cassette tapes and within a year I spoke English well enough that almost no one could tell it wasn't my native language.
When the kids stopped making fun of me and I had made friends I didn't abandon the library. I had a plan actually. I'd started my reading of the fiction section by pulling the first book on the shelf - Alcott's "Little Women" off the shelf and read it cover to cover and when I was done I went to the next book on the shelf and my plan was to read every book on every shelf from A - Z before I graduated.
But I wasn't in high school long. I tested out of nearly every subject and was taking all my math and science classes at the nearby college who like many others, were recruiting me. How does a girl who has never been to school one day in her life before the past two years test out of high school they asked my parents - who told them I was smart but when they asked me I had a much simpler answer.
One thing I left out about the wonderful Madame Martin whom I loved dearly and kept in touch with until she passed away when I was 25 was that those 7 books she would choose for me every two weeks weren't always books full of adventure and fun, but also books about math and science and history and interesting people who had fascinating lives and did amazing things. And those books, they were my teachers, and now as I try to write a book of my own they continue to teach me.
There are a lot of things being said about why libraries shouldn't be closed and why they should. If you have any doubt that libraries are not important, then I hope my story will, despite that I didn't grow up impoverished with no other access to books, show you their vital place in a world that considers itself "civilized" because it is for those who cannot afford books that libraries must remain open and free and the wonderful places they've been in the past for the sake of the future.
For me personally I look back on my odd childhood and wonder would I have done all the things I accomplished in my life without the books I read as a child, a teenager, and as an adult. Would I have completed my double doctorate from MIT if it hadn't been for a woman in a small French town taking an interest in me? An interest that even my book loving father didn't seem to understand? Obviously reading The Chronicles of Narnia didn't exactly get me into MIT, but it did keep me from being a lonely little girl and gave me the desire to be great. And while there are problems in life that books and libraries can't solve, I look at my own library, 2,000+ books strong and growing at every opportunity and all I hope is that anybody who wants to read a good book can because that's what libraries do. They make books available to everyone.
What Terry Deary said in this article in The Guardian is the kind of drivel I expect to read in The Mail. How any writer would want to deny books to anyone is beyond my comprehension. That he doesn't seem to care how public libraries actually contribute to people buying books when they can afford them just goes to show how out of touch he really is and it's sadder still to me because he writes for children. No, Terry Deary doesn't want to get his 6p for lending his books, for him that is not an investment in the future. He wants the 30p he would get for selling his book in a bookshop, never you mind that being the 10th most borrowed author from libraries means that lots of people are reading his books many among them probably children since that is his genre. No, no. Let's screw the future for 24p.
I hope his greed and poor attitude come back to bite him in the ass. I hope the librarians, who buy his books to make them available in their libraries are more reluctant to do so in the future. I hope that he understands exactly who he has insulted - his readers past and present, librarians and those who help to keep the libraries running, and those who know what the true cost would be if the public library system disappeared forever.
Deary adds, "Books aren't public property, and writers aren't Enid Blyton, middle-class women indulging in a pleasant little hobby. They've got to make a living. Authors, booksellers and publishers need to eat. We don't expect to go to a food library to be fed."
I just wanted to close this post with that so you can see what a fucking idiot he is because his attempt to sound clever is bumbled best in this particular quote though "car libraries" lending "Porsches" also illustrates his true motivations rather well, but the food libraries quote is slightly better at showing just how out of touch he really is because he's not bitching about Amazon (who fucks authors and publishers much more effectively than any library ever could) or how ebooks might be changing the model for book publishing and how that might be having some impact on the industry but rather calling to close libraries because he only makes 6,000 a year. If he feels so strongly, why not just not let your books be sold to libraries? Funny how that isn't mentioned, which means 6,000 a year must be better than nothing.
I'm sure the lovely librarians who in Deary's world would lose their jobs and their incomes can find another author who would happily accept 6,000 pounds a year to be the 10th most borrowed author in British libraries. And I'm even more sure they could find an author more deserving too because I've read a few of his books.
Save libraries people. As Neil Gaiman put it, "don't borrow from the future to pay for today".
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