The Library = The Learner’s All-You-Can-Eat Buffet of Life

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“The world was hers for the reading” — Betty Smith

This is one of my favorite quotes for two key reasons.

First, I spent 14 glorious years as a learner at The Hockaday School, an all-girls school with a long history of educating young girls and women in Dallas, TX. The school rolled out its new mission statement in 2015:

“Believing in the limitless potential of girls, Hockaday develops resilient, confident women who are educated and inspired to lead lives of purpose and impact.”

Although this mission statement is new, to me it perfectly embodies my personal experience in its hallowed halls and also what has always been the mission since the school’s inception in 1913 by its founder, Miss Ela Hockaday.

As a result of this female-focused educational upbringing, I always appreciate when a quote or comment uses the female gendered, hers, rather than the more commonly used male gendered, his.

Second, I firmly believe that we learn mostly through experience. You can see this if you closely observe any toddler or pre-school age child playing. Recently, my 15-month-old son has learned how to open doors. Last night I observed him opening and closing the door over and over and over in sequence too many times to count. I never explicitly taught him how to open a door. He learned through observing and doing, through experience.

However, we will never live long enough nor have enough disposable income or free time, nor, perhaps, always the insatiable desire or youth to experience all things possible in life. Therefore, I propose that reading is the next best way to experience our world– both across various centuries and across various countries, communities, and cultures. Inside the pages of a book, you can accompany Odysseus through his epic trials and tribulations on his Odysseyan journey home after the fall of Troy. You can experience the depths of fear and darkness alongside 33 trapped Chilean miners and bear witness to the heroic lengths others went to in order to free them. You can experience life through the eyes of others in pretty much any (auto)biography or memoir of your choosing. Books open up almost any and all experience to us. Experiences that might otherwise be out of our reach or literally impossible for us to experience first hand. In this way, the quote “The world was hers for the reading” is an absolute truth for me.

This is where the library comes in. The library gives us access to human experience. It allows us to experience for ourselves– in a small way– all human experience.

So, although I do still appreciate Audible, I canceled my membership for now and committed, instead, to exploring my local Charlotte Mecklenburg Library. In addition to visiting local branches, I downloaded the mobile apps OverDrive, Hoopla, Libby, and Kindle in order to access Ebooks and Audiobooks more directly and easily.

Since beginning my January 2019 Intention to “BE a READER” I have read, courtesy of Charlotte Mecklenburg Library, the following titles (* indicates titles not yet finished):

  • The More of Less by Joshua Becker
  • The Self-Driven Child The Science and Sense of Giving Your Kids More Control Over Their Lives by William Stixrud & Ned Johnson
  • The Vanishing American Adult: Our Coming of Age Crisis- and How to Rebuild a Culture of Self-Reliance by Ben Sasse
  • The Most Important Year: Pre-Kindergarten and the Future of Our Children by Suzanne Bouffard
  • Slow: Simple Living for a Frantic World by Brooke McAlary
  • When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi
  • Sitting Still Like a Frog: Mindfulness Exercises for Kids by Eline Snel
  • Happier at Home by Gretchen Rubin
  • The Road to Character by David Brooks
  • *How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character by Paul Tough
  • * Small Great Things by Jodi Picoult
  • * I am Malala by Christina Lamb & Malala Yousafzai

Prior to that 2019 New Year Intention, I had now and again used Char-Meck Library to dabble with getting back into a rhythm of reading. Some titles I enjoyed were:

 

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