!How I read
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agk's diary
20 August 2023 @ 18:14 UTC
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written on GPD Win 1
in bed with Evy while everyone but me naps
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I have a particular taste in books. I've gotten my
hands on books I want to read a variety of ways.
Child me read all my parents' books and all the
library's. Teen me stole. Young adult me tricked
for books (and still stole). Finally I found inter-
library loan. I rarely buy a book anymore, though I
still own thousands.
I don't know how universal public libraries and
inter-library loan is in other countries, but it is
one of the good things about mine. I can check out
books my local library doesn't own. They come from
public and university libraries all over the count-
ry. If any library circulates it, I can borrow it.
Before Kentucky I lived in North Carolina. I worked
as in-home caregiver to a woman in my church with
advanced dementia, and helped my grandparents with
their affairs. I was far below the poverty line,
without health insurance, cautious of catastrophe.
My biggest discretionary expense was $50/year for a
card at the university library so I could borrow
books from the inter-library loan system.
Social theory, sociology, and philosophy books ref-
erenced a shared corpus of texts, so I bought read-
ers designed for survey classes to acquaint me. The
600+ page paperbacks titled Classic Sociological
Theory, Contemporary Sociological Theory, Political
and Moral Philosophy, etc. were cheap if bought an
edition or two back. They acquainted me with Weber,
Durkheim, Marx, Bourdieu, and others, and re-
acquainted me with Plato and Aristotle through Kant
and Hegel to Nietzche and Kierkegaard.
Anything else I could read in a semester or less
came from, and returned to, the library. After I
moved I was a college student, and inter-library
loan books came from my college library. A librar-
ian told me no other student checked out as many as
I did. I also voraciously used non-circulating ref-
erence books, especially 120-year-old volumes of
the census and congressional records.
No longer a student, I was thrilled to find my town
public library offers inter-library loan as a free
service to its members (library membership is also
free). I finished and returned Call Home The Heart
yesterday. Now it's being sent back to a state uni-
versity library. I picked up the 1938 Federal
Writers Project Tennessee Guide and, for first dau-
ghter, Doris Kunhardt's classic Now Open The Box in
its recent beautiful reprint.
When deciding if I want to read a book, I usually
check the web to see if Anna's Archive has a pdf or
epub to review. Sometimes I read a review or two
from academic journals on Libgen. If the book'll
take 6+ months to read, I'll probably need to own
it. C. Vann Woodward's Origins of the New South,
for example, Agnes Heller's Ethics of Personality,
or Fernand Braudel's The Mediterranean. Otherwise,
I bike to town, tell a librarian, and wait for my
next adventure to arrive.
