Did you know that libraries are full of books?

I've noticed several other friends mentioning their love for their public library systems. I, too, have re-discovered the public library here in Mililani. Now, the library here is nothing special. It has no cool check out system, it has no easy online renewal system (which really irks me), and it doesn't have the greatest selection of books (though you can have books sent from any of the other public libraries on the island for free), and it certainly doesn't have enough parking spaces. What it does have are lots and lots of books to read.

Now, you may be saying to yourself, "Duh, Liz. All libraries are full of books to read. Have you never been to a library before?"

Why yes, I have been to a library before. Many of them, in fact. I've practically lived in a few of them. But the beautiful, wonderful, breathtakingly large libraries I have been frequenting for the past seven years include the BYU library (oh, be still my heart) and the Library of Congress. (GW's campus library was LAME. But again, I could still get all the books I needed through the consortium.) A university/research library is a very different beast than a good old public library. And while I love rows and rows of academic books, anthologies, and research tomes, what a university library lacks are fun, frivolous, and entertaining books to read.

Not that I don't love to read a good academic book. I loved a lot of the books I read in graduate school. On average, I read 2-3 books per week. And by read, I mean skimmed really fast and then read the book reviews/summaries written by other really smart people. Some of the books I read for my courses, I'd recommend to anyone. The Age of Homespun or The Midwife's Tale by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich. (Um, anything by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich. I really love her. She's my academic hero. Her and Lynn Spigel. Oh, and Delores Hayden. And Amy Kaplan.) The Refinement of America by Richard Bushman. A Traffic of Dead Bodies by Michael Sappol. The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction by Linda Gordon. Make Room for TV by Lynn Spigel and Cold War Orientalism by Christina Klein. There's some seriously good stuff out there in the academic world. And while a good deal of it is poorly written or badly organized, there are a few jems out there that unfortunately don't get the recognition they deserve from a wider audience. It's the rare academic that can bridge the gap between academic books and trade books.

So while I loved a good portion of the books I read in both my undergraduate and graduate studies, the one thing I truly missed was reading a book for the shear enjoyment of reading. There's nothing I love more than getting truly, blissfully, and unequivocally caught up in a good book. I love getting to know new characters, I love rooting around in their lives, taking a piece of their heart and wisdom away with me once the story is over.

And now that I'm not in school and only theoretically employed, I have re-awakened my love of reading by diving into anything and everything. I'm at the public library at least once a week looking for new books. I jump around between historical narratives and biographies, classics of English/world literature, cookbooks, contemporary fiction, and "chick-lit" fiction which are surprisingly satisfying, almost like a good romantic comedy. For the past month, I've been thoroughly engrossed in Diana Gabaldon's Outlander series. Borders labels them as romance books. My library calls them fantasy. I'd call them historical fiction with a science fiction twist. But however you want to label them, they are detailed, nuanced books, well-written and worth each page. (They're extremely long. The series has six books and each is well over 800 pages.) If you've got the time to spare, they're so worth it. I'm on the last book now and I think David will be quite happy once I'm done because I've been staying up late to read.

I love books. I love the way they smell and feel of their heft in my hand. I love their crinkled pages and dog-eared corners and row after row of perfectly sculpted text. Books, as Jonathan Rosen said, are the companions of our soul. Most of all, I love the story within and the way some writers can bend words in ways I never knew you could, the way they can break your heart with a subtle, well-placed preposition. I often wish I had that talent. I often wish I had that way with words. But then again, I've never tried to write anything other than a journal entry, a blog post, or a term paper. I've never been a great storyteller or a creative writer, yet I often dream of writing and being published and taking my words and arranging them in such a way as to be truly beautiful. Maybe someday. But I'm fully convinced that the only way to learn to be a better writer is to read the writings of others until you find your own voice.

And for that, I am glad for the public library and how they are full of books to read.

Look how literate I am!?!?!?

I found this off my friend Abby's blog. (Who is a librarian and therefore awesome.) I've attempted many times to read those "100 books to read before you die" type lists but I'm still working on it. I want to read everything, so I'm only going to italicize the ones I REALLY want to read and actually mean it.

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline (or mark in a different color) the books you LOVE
4) Reprint this list in your blog so we can try and track down these people who’ve read 6 and force books upon them ;-)

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien (I got about 60 pages into it....does that count? I want to read them but I have a feeling that the movies did such a good job, there's no need to for anyone to read them ever again.)
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte (The new Masterpiece Theatre adaption of this book is sooo good.)
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens (Okay....so maybe I never did finish the whole book, but I was *this* close!)
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (Everything? Seriously?)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier (I've seen the movie...)
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck (Steinbeck happens to rock. East of Eden is my favorite though.)
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy (Do I get extra points for at least owning this book?)
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood (I read the Edible Woman. Does it count that I've read ONE of her books?!?!? It totally should.)
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan (My mom says this is really good....)
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy (Tess of the D'Ubervilles was hard enough....thank you very much...)
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett (I LOVED this book as a child.)
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray (Saw the movie. It did not inspire me to read the book.)
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Okay, first why does it say "The complete works of William Shakespeare" on #14 and then list Hamlet as #98? Shouldn't Hamlet be covered under that? Same to the fact that Lion, Witch and the Wardobe is part of the Chronicles of Narnia. And what's with all the love Charles Dickens is getting on this list? Aren't all his books the same? I mean, c'mon...

But really, this makes me realize that I've read more than I realized but that I still have a long way to go until I can really be proud of myself. (Though I think my English teacher mother, who has probably read every single one of these books--no joke--would be quite proud of me.) It's a good thing I just got my Hawaii Public Library card two days ago. (I won't even mention how ridiculous they were about giving me one either.) Sadly, their collection is quite pitiful (but then again, I've spent the last 7 years around the BYU library and the Library of Congress which tends to give you a superiority complex when it comes to well-stocked libraries) but they've got to have some of these books. (And I won't even discuss how aghast I was to discover that no library on this blasted island as Elizabeth Gaskell's Wives and Daughters.) Of course, I quickly picked up several books to read, but most were either cookbooks or historical non-fiction. I've got 400 pages left (of 700ish) of Team of Rivals, and then I've got Founding Mothers and Theodore Rex to breeze through before I can get to some fiction. Yay for books! They make me so happy.