Last October, I moved out of the city centre where I had lived for the past four years and settled 25 mins away in the “people in their 30s town”. Besides it being full of local shops and following the three-bakeries-per-street rule, this small town seems to be a place made for book lovers. There are three second-hand bookshops five minutes from my house, a library just around the corner, and a street library!
I had heard of street libraries, that magical, sometimes hidden place, usually a wooden box or a repurposed phone booth, where people exchange books for free, but I had never seen one in person.
The one in my neighbourhood is a small wooden cabinet in a quiet street decorated with fairy lights. I don’t know who built it or why, but it’s there, and I’ve been visiting it regularly since my discovery.
Using a street library
I’ve made it part of my routine to check on the library once a week, usually on Saturday mornings when I run errands. One of my favourite activities this summer has been to go by the library to pick up a book and then go to the park and read. This forces me to read books I would typically ignore. The best book I’ve found so far has been The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman, a book I would’ve usually ignored (despite it being a bestseller) because the protagonists are in their 70s and 80s.
I prefer to read characters closer to my age, yet this book is amazing! I had so much fun reading it. I hope whoever left it in the library will also drop the second and third parts of the series.
So far, my library experience has been a bit hit or miss. Once the excitement of exchanging books wore off, I realised the selection of books wasn’t that good. It seems to be a combination of biographies from people I’ve never heard of, some old cookbooks, airport bestsellers and kids’ books.
I get so excited when I find a good book or see someone has taken the one I left the last time. It’s starting to become a hobby of mine to keep track of the books that come and go. I think I’m getting too attached to this cabinet.
While I’ve never seen anyone using the library, new books sems to come and go, so someone else must be exchanging books too, right? I hope they like the ones I leave.
Even if it’s just a small group of people using it, and sometimes the books aren’t the most interesting, I’m so thankful to whoever started it. I’ve discovered lots of new stories and authors through this tiny cabinet.
Libraries are so important to me, I used to love going to the library as a kid, but after getting a Kindle and moving countries, I forgot what it’s like to visit a library, how exciting it can be to be in a room full of books and you can read them all, for free!
The local library in my town, while extremely small, is always full of people and I recently started going there twice a month, and I always leave with at least three books in my bag.
This summer so far has been a summer for reading; after complaining about the heat in my previous post at the end of June, July has been nothing more than non-stop rain and a cool 16°C, the best weather for reading.
Willow in Winter 