Booking Through Thursday--Libraries

I found an interesting Booking Through Thursday from last August, and thought I'd do it this Thursday.

Whether you usually read off of your own book pile or from the library shelves NOW, chances are you started off with trips to the library. (There’s no way my parents could otherwise have kept up with my book habit when I was 10.) So … What is your earliest memory of a library? Who took you? Do you have you any funny/odd memories of the library?

There's a library about three blocks away from my parents house, and I went there almost daily as a child. Most of the librarians still recognize me and say hi. The library was remodeled when I was eleven or so (and boy was it a chore having to take the bus if I wanted to go to the library), so it doesn't look as it did when I was small. The children's book section was at the back of the library by the windows that look down the hill, and they always had the same stuffed animals. I have very specific memories of looking for a book on King Arthur, books on the planets, of refusing to check out Anne of Green Gables because I thought it was stupid (I've no idea where I got this notion, and I've since dispensed with it). I remember the old computers, green font on black before it was PCs, but I'm too young to have ever known card catalogs. It must have been after they remodeled that I graduated to looking in the teen section for reading material (and it was there that I first discovered Pamela Dean's Secret Country trilogy), and somewhere along the way I drifted out of that section and wandered into the general fiction.

The old library was red brick and very square, and downstairs they had a room where they did events like authors speaking, and I remember pretty vividly once for some reason they had a fellow who brought in pot-bellied pigs. Now the library's all modern, giant glass windows, light fixtures that look like chocolate fountains and fried eggs, but at least it's not a really annoying kind of modern. It's managed to stay cosy, especially in winter. I used to go after school (two blocks away) all the time with my mother, and on weekends with my father. I remember being very excited when I got old enough (or maybe it was just that I'd had the library card long enough) to check out as many books at a time as I wanted, instead of having a limit. It was also very exciting (many years later) when the library started being open on Sundays (which had always seemed like the best day to be there, except that it wasn't open). I always got annoyed at school when we went to the school library and they made us check things out, because I already had books from the "real" library and I didn't need more. I think I've been through two library cards, though I have a vague notion that I found the old card after I got the new one. Mine is still older than the current edition of cards, which are blue. Mine is red, but scuffed in places where it's gotten white.

Booking Through Thursday---on a Thursday!

Here is today's Booking Through Thursday:

Are there any particular worlds in books where you’d like to live?
Or where you certainly would NOT want to live?
What about authors? If you were a character, who would you trust to write your life?

I'd very much like to live in the Villa San Girolamo in The English Patient. I could do without the mines all over, but the room the English patient lives in sounds wonderful, and the fact that it's all crumbling would just make it better--it would be a bit like living in the past, but with present, living flowers all around you. The world outside the villa, however, not so much. And in reality, of course, I might not like it so much. But for a visit that would be great.

The Oxford of To Say Nothing of the Dog I'd also be pretty keen on, because what's better than living in Oxford and being able to time travel?

I can't actually think of a place in a book that I would really not want to live, although I'm sure such a place is out there. I think I probably avoid books that are about places that I would not for any reason want to live in. There are lots of books that I would not actually want to live in even if there are appealing bits of them, but none that sound wholly unpleasant.

As for an author who I'd like to write my life--overall, I think Pamela Dean could do a creditable job of it, but that's mostly because I like her writing so much. I think if we're talking about my life at present and somebody writing a novel about me as I am now, I'd like Eva Rice to have a go at it. She wrote The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets, which was a great book, with a main character who is about my age, and which captures incredibly well being that age. Something in that book, though none of the events or the settings or anything much about it resembles my life, something really reminded me of myself.

Booking Through Thursday, one day late

Here's yesterday's Booking Through Thursday.

What are your favourite final sentences from books? Is there a book that you liked specially because of its last sentence? Or a book, perhaps that you didn’t like but still remember simply because of the last line?

Well, there are a lot of books that I have favourite beginning lines from--Daniel Deronda, The Tennant of Wildfell Hall, and beginning lines tend to be the better known (maybe because so many people get that far in the classics, but not all the way to the last lines). But I am a total sucker for a good last line, especially in my own writing. I strive to end on something neat and tidy, that says something either witty or meaningful. It tends to wind up curtailing some of my scenes, though I try to avoid that, simply because I can't resist ending the scene on such a good line. I really liked the last line of North and South (which I won't give away), but I can't say it was that memorable--I just looked it up so I would remember what it was I liked about it.

So I guess I really can't say that there's a book that I remember especially for it's last line.