Sherman Alexie and My Love Affair with the Library

I love libraries. One summer, I think I was five, my aunt took her kids and my siblings and me to our local library and signed us all up for library cards. Every week that summer either my aunt or my mother would drive the five cousins to the library. It was heaven on earth. That tradition continued for many years.

When my daughter was small we attended story time at our local library--much bigger than my first local library. We went to the library almost every week. Sometimes more than that. We moved two years ago; my daughter started school; I started working again. And going to the awesome library in our new neighborhood became a more rare occasion. A few weeks ago on our way home, she asked if we could go to the library. So we did, and we're trying to make it a habit again.

Last week, I went to the library on my own, which was a nice treat. I wandered around the fiction section without feeling rushed. I picked up probably nine novels before I decided that nine novels is probably too many for the time I have. Three is a much easier number to manage. I grabbed a Judy Blume novel (turns out I had already read it, but I enjoyed the re-read) The Edible Woman by Margaret Atwood, which I'm currently reading, and Flight by Sherman Alexie.

Here's one of the things I love about the library: I love Sherman Alexie. I know that I love Sherman Alexie, but I sometimes forget that I want to read Sherman Alexie. Now this has less to do with Sherman Alexie and more to do with my own fleeting and flighty memory. So the library is great because I wander down an aisle, see an Alexie novel, and am reminded that I wanted to read more of his work. The library provides.