i always think of that story by saki (h.h. munro) when it starts to snow. i loved his stories when i was a kid. maybe i still would. anyway, it's snowing here right now. i should be home curled in a down comforter with a good book. i am instead in the college library giving chapter retests to students in danger of failing beginning grammar class. student, actually, singular. the others didn't show up. well, okay, it is snowing. we're facing one more week before our much-needed winter break. a week of final exams and grades, of exhausted sick students, lagging will-power. final exams are an invention of the devil. we are required to give them. if we don't know what our students have learned, actually learned and now know, by this point, there's something wrong with us as teachers.
i've been reading book reviews and blogs, getting lots of ideas for things to read during the long-awaited break. the C.S. Monitor turns out to have a wealth of information in its book section online. good lists of the past year's worthwhile books. i have Shirley Hazzard's NBC awardwinner, The Great Fire, David Guterson's Our Lady of the Forest, and Toni Morrison's new novel, Love, at the head of the list. great book energy coming from spending time in a library. i love libraries. clean, quiet, well-lighted places full of books, magazines, newspapers, rolls of microfilm. libraries and museums, places where i feel safely in the bosom of civilization and order. yes, i know it's an illusion. but i like it anyway.
5 comments:
I love libraries too, but I'm finding myself more often at the big chain bookstores. I like the cafes and the hot off the press new releases. Do you think Borders will take over and make libraries empty museums of ghosts?
y'know, i was thinking this morning in the library: if only there was a coffee bar. so, maybe what needs to happen is....libraries will start having coffee bars as an enticement to lure people AWAY frpm the big box bookstores! but really, without libraries i'd have to stop reading. i can't afford to buy books very often, so the Big Stores won't care about me anyway.
before you try to get a coffee shop in a library, read McDonaldization:The Reader by George Ritzer, and see what you think. I was at the library on Sunday and thought the same thing though! We want it all :-)
Funny you mention saki--I think I read a saki story today about two enemy men who have a tree fall on them as they are about to blast each other away with guns, and they make peace with each other as they lie there pinned to the woodsy ground. I won't give away the ending--am i thinking of the right story? I read a bunch of shorties today....
I think coffee is a good idea, chair massage another. After all, they used to have libraries INSIDE the public baths in Rome. Health, culture, leisure--spa for the mind and body....
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