Libraries

I greatly approve of the idea of libraries, in principle. Everyone should have access to a wide variety of books, and they have entire teams of people who seem to find great satisfaction in helping you find something to read. Libraries are places to collect knowledge and distribute it to anyone who asks for it. Their function seems to epitomize the concepts of freedom and equality, where anyone can read any book they choose, freely, and then pass it on to someone else, sharing knowledge.

But they have one flaw, in my eyes. They want their books back.

This is necessary for the whole "sharing" part of the sharing knowledge thing, I know, but somehow it feels like every book I read becomes a part of me, and I don't want to let that part go. I was never so happy and comfortable in my apartment as when I got more bookcases and could finally look at all of my books at the same time. This fulfills some deep-seated need inside me, for which I have no explanation. My mother and sister are perfectly happy to read a book once and release it back into the wild, never to be seen or heard from again, here one day and then gone, like the wind. (Possibly with,..)
I am perfectly happy to lend books out for extended periods of time, like foreign exchange children, sending them out to see the world, knowing they will come back one day enriched and wise from their travels, eager to share their journeys with the stay-at-home books still on the shelves. But I might want to read them again! Or lend a particular book to someone who absolutely has to read it, in my opinion. (There are a lot of books a lot of people absolutely have to read, usually starting with the last one I just finished.) Plus I feel like I've just won something when I find some old, out of print SF book I-just-realized-I've-been-looking-for-my-whole-life in a back corner of a used-book store, how could I let it go afterward? SF readers tend to be hoarders, it's not just me. I've heard from used-book store owners that the only way they get large collections of SF is when the owners die and can't complain about people giving away their books anymore.

Maybe my problem with libraries is I don't own them. Maybe I should have been a librarian. Maybe if I continue accumulating books, I can just open my own library,..

At any rate, I now have a library card for the Harris Country Public Library and have requested about 50 things from their online catalog. They actually have a very good selection of movies and TV show seasons on DVD, which are much easier to return after watching. And I finally requested Your Money or Your Life, a personal finance book I couldn't bring myself to spend money on but have been wanting to read.

So hopefully I will be able to overcome my squirrel-like hoarding instinct and Charlton Heston-like resistance-to-having-things-pried-from-my-warm-and-living-hand instinct and give them their books back when I'm done reading them.