Tuesday, June 4, 2013

Ten Reasons to Go to the Library

1. So you can go to the self-checkout and make things beep. 

2. So your children will see a place where people, lots of people, think books are cool.

3. To watch the librarians sit at the check-out desk doing stuff on the computer and wonder what they are doing. Researching books? Solitaire? Blogging?

3. So your children will know books are important to you.

4. So you can win the stares of the librarians as you go to the self-checkout with seventy-five books. Checking out seventy-five books takes way to long at the self-checkout, as the librarians well know, but you can't go to the regular check-out because there's still that one book you can't find and is now two months overdue. And you're pretty sure the librarians know exactly what you are doing. If your children are with you, you can use them as a shield and pretend they are insisting you go to the self-checkout so they can help checkout books. Even though they never do this.

5. So libraries can get funding to buy more books—libraries are generally funded based on circulation and use. 

6. So you can hang your head with shame as your fines add up to well above ten dollars. Then you nod gratefully as the librarian tells you that your fines will only be ten dollars because they never charge more than that for fines. (You sort of have to pretend you didn't know that they always reduce fines to ten dollars, because otherwise you will feel very guilty that you waited for your fines to build and build...).

7. So your kids can have every option in the world available to them and they can try on all different kinds of books on for size—books you will never find at Barnes and Noble.

7. So your account on the library website can look like this:
Account Overview

Items Out- See and renew currently checked out items
  Checked Out: 136
  Overdue: 2
  Lost: 0
Hold Requests- Items ready to be picked up and waiting to become available
  Requested items ready for pick up: 0
  Requested items not yet available: 7
Blocks- Fines, blocks and account messages
  Number of Blocks: 90
  Current Balance: $11.80

(Number of blocks 90? What does that even mean???)

8. So you can pretend you are buying books by bringing Trader Joe's bags and stuffing them silly. Then you can talk to yourself at the self-checkout about how this is really going to cost too much money and you should never, ever buy books again, because you have a problem. It's like a nicotine patch.

9. So your children can make friends with the librarians and become little Matilda's—because who doesn't want their children to be little Matilda's?

10. So on a day when your house is really messy and you just realized that your seven-year-old has chewed a hole through his t-shirt because he has a t-shirt sucking issue and your five-year-old is getting warts (!) and your eleven-year-old's rabbit has chewed a hole through a bookcase (yes, a hole) and your husband suddenly has no socks—zero—and yesterday, your twelve-year-old snapped the fingerboard off her violin in a colossal trip and your nine-year-old dragged homeschool out so he wasn't finished until nine o'clock at night, you can say to yourself, "Well, at least I take my kids to the library!"

Here are some of the greatest picture books in the world for your library trip this week:

Boxes for Katje by Candace Fleming
The Cats in Krasinski Square by Karen Hesse
The Story of Ruby Bridges by Robert Cole
Too Many Frogs by Sandy Asher
The Boy Who Cried Bigfoot! by Scott Magoon
Finklehopper Frog by Irene Livingston
The Incredible Book Eating Boy by Oliver Jeffers
Buttons by Brock Cole


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