Journal Prompt: Library
Do you visit your local library? Do you remember to have books back on time?
Brandice sent me this list of journal prompts last night. So I opened and decided to scroll through the prompts. I just started scrolling up and down really quickly and let me cursor land wherever. Oddly enough, it landed on this question about library books. Odd mainly because I returned a library book this morning. Late.
Here’s my issue: I go online to renew the book, I haven’t renewed it once yet and it’s not late at the time I go to renew it. And I can’t, because someone has the book reserved. I’m all about reserving books, I do it all the time. But the person who has requested the book is just waiting for the notice from the library, so they’re not going to miss my copy specifically if I renew it for another couple of weeks. And even if my copy is the only copy (which is isn’t, the book in question is #4 of Harry Potter; I feel confident in assuming that the New York Public Library system has MANY copies of this book) the person who requested the book knows they need to wait patiently until the book is available. So again, they won’t know the difference if I extend another couple weeks.
I mean, I have the book! And I haven’t finished reading it! (I requested the book and it came in immediately. I wasn’t expecting it to come so early, so I waiting a couple weeks to started reading it, because I was finishing up something else. You know, I probably got it so quickly because they forced some 12 year old to return it without finishing it…)
At any rate, I got Tim’s sister’s hard copy from his house last week, so now I have this giant weapon of a copy of the book to finish reading, so no real harm there (other than the book is so large in this format it actually hurts my wrists to hold it up). But it’s still annoying.
And I still returned it late. Half just to spite the library (and my wallet, heh), half because I just didn’t feel like/have time to walk the 20 minutes down to the library until today.
But yeah, I’m an avid library patron. I haven’t converted to ebooks yet and I’m too cheap (and like to read too much) to buy every book I want to read. The library system in NYC is great, mostly because it’s so large they basically have any book you could imagine. If you’re branch doesn’t have a copy of what you need, you just request it online and they email you when it’s there waiting for you (and as mentioned above, that usually happens really quickly).
