Library, oh library, where for art thou in my heart?

A Love Letter to Libraries, and the People Who Still Use Them

I'll start by saying there's nothing much to this post, just a love of libraries, books, and a moment of free time to get some thoughts out. Really, I just returned three books to the Asbury Park Library today — The Princess Bride, Peter Pan, and The Forever Dog Life cookbook (which was good enough that I bought a copy on Thriftbooks so Lynds and I can cook for Kevin and cancel Farmer's Dog, because what's the point of reading it if it wasn't going to influence us to take matters into our own hands, amiright?).

I re-checked out Vicious by V.E. Schwab, I'd checked out before but hadn't finished because The Princess Bride was surprisingly long, and Peter Pan was surprisingly droll (sorry, it was a hard one for me, I'll stick to watching Hook), and I grabbed Kindred by Octavia Butler that had been on hold because it's the Book Bros Book Club Book of the Month pick by Nick this month, which I'm excited to read because it involves time travel to a degree.

The whole trip took maybe 30 minutes, a record for getting me out of a building full of books (thanks ADHD). I walked home with two books in my hand and a sweet grin on my face, and I started thinking about how long I've been doing this — just... going to libraries.

That's it. Again, that's what this post is about. Libraries.

Time Enough at Last

There's a Twilight Zone episode that stands out in my mind — "Time Enough at Last," season one, 1959 — where a man named Henry Bemis loves reading more than anything in the world, but everyone around him treats it like a character flaw. His wife rips pages out of his books. His boss threatens to fire him for reading on the job. All the poor guy wants is time to sit and read. Then a nuclear bomb goes off while he's in the bank vault, and he emerges as the last man on Earth! He stumbles through the rubble, finds a library with its books still intact, stacks them into piles organized by what he'll read first — finally — and as he bends down to pick up the first one, his glasses fall off and shatter.

"That's not fair. That's not fair at all. There was time now." (engage my tear ducts)

It's one of the cruelest endings in television history, and it's stuck with me since I first watched it. Because I am Henry Bemis. Not the nuclear apocalypse part (hopefully, jeez), but the part where reading feels like the thing I'd do if everything else fell away.

I sometimes think about having a hyperbolic time chamber like in DBZ and being able to spend months reading in there only to have minutes pass outside, or else I think about what superpower I'd want if I were afforded one... I'm torn between the power to heal someone by touch or the ability to touch a book and instantly experience the full process of reading it. Not a summary, not the CliffsNotes, the whole experience of analytically reading a book instantly. Every word, every pause, every moment where the author does something that makes you stop and look up from the page.

If I had that power I'd clear out the Asbury Park Library in an afternoon, then walk to the next one, and the next one, just running through entire collections like some kind of literary speedrunner. Completely useless to anyone else. I'd think I'd like that very much indeed.

Where It Started

My mom read to me a lot when I was a kid, she also read with me, not just to me, which I think matters a lot. She'd sit with me and we'd go through books together, and at some point the switch flipped and I was doing it on my own. I burned through various Boxcar Children adverntures, the Hardy Boys, and, this one dates me but I don't care, Hank the Cowdog, which I listened to on cassette while following along with the book and still revel in the magic of that experience. By the time I was a teenager I was reading Shakespeare and philosophy, which sounds pretentious but was really just a kid who ran out of age-appropriate books and kept going.

That spark never went out. I always take a book on a trip, even if I know I won't finish it. It's just better than doom scrolling, and there's something about having a physical book in your hands, the weight of it and the smell of the pages, especially an old one, that a screen can't replicate (sorry I'm not sorry Kindle). Reading has always been a ebb and flow, sometimes an obsession, but a healthy one... right?

The Buildings Themselves

I've been lucky enough to spend time in some libraries that are experiences, not just buildings with books in them.

Phoenix — Burton Barr Central Library

When I lived in Phoenix, the Tempe Library was my go-to being my hometown library, but the Burton Barr Central Library was another and is one of those places that makes you understand why architecture matters. Designed by Will Bruder, opened in 1995, five stories, 280,000 square feet, and a million-volume collection. Decent for sure.

The building is modeled after an Arizona mesa, with copper-clad walls on the east and west sides that weather and change over time like the desert landscape around it. The central atrium, they call it the "Crystal Canyon", is this vertical glass core with elevators and a frosted glass staircase connecting all five floors, and the top floor is one of the largest reading rooms in North America.

The whole thing won the AIA's Twenty-five Year Award in 2021 for standing the test of time, and it earned a LEED Silver certification before LEED even existed. It's the kind of library that makes you want to sit down and stay a while because of the clean, open, light pouring in through the skylights that track the sun's movement. Just a beautifully thought-out space.

Seattle — Central Library

Then I moved to Seattle in 2008 and discovered a library that gave Burton Barr a run for its money.

The Seattle Central Library, designed by Rem Koolhaas and OMA, opened in 2004, is eleven stories of glass and steel that looks like someone stacked a bunch of geometric shapes on top of each other and wrapped them in a diamond-shaped exoskeleton. It's aggressively modern. Paul Goldberger called it the most important new library built in a generation, and honestly, walking into it for the first time felt like stepping into the future. Like if an iPod manifested itself into a building solely for making audiobooks physical.

But two things stuck with me more than anything else.

The Red Floor. Level 4 is entirely, entirely, covered in red. Thirteen shades of it. The walls, the floors, the ceiling, the stairs, the curved hallways. It's where the meeting rooms are, and the design is supposed to evoke the feeling of being inside a body - cardiovascular, organic, alive. It's surreal and beautiful and a little disorienting, and I loved it.

The view from the top. If you walk all the way up past the Book Spiral, this continuous, wheelchair-accessible ramp that runs the nonfiction collection across four floors without a single break in the Dewey Decimal sequence, you get to an amazing vantage point at the very top of the building. From there you can look down through the center of the library, through all these levels and platforms, and see the whole thing at once. It's like a crow's nest on a ship made of books... a scenic overlook of the library itself. I spent a lot of time up there.

I lived in the Ravenna neighborhood that year, worked for Nintendo when they were in Ballard, and didn't have a car. I was broke in the best way possible. I rode the bus, I dumpster dived (don't judge, Seattle is the spot for that sort of thing and I was in my twenties) and we ate like a kings because the grocery stores near me would put out perfectly good meat that had hit its sell-by date, and some of them knew people would come looking so they'd set food in boxes to make it clean and easy. I spent about twelve dollars over several months (other than rent and basics), and with all that free time I just read books, drew a lot, played video games with my roommates, and tried online dating (with mixed results, to put it charitably). The library was a huge part of that year. Free, warm, full of books, and open to anyone who walked in.

Where I Am Now

These days my library is the Asbury Park Library, and it's not the Burton Barr or the Seattle Central. It's a public library. A normal one. The kind where you walk in and someone might be (almost always is) sleeping in a chair in the central reading area, and you're not entirely sure if they're reading or just getting out of the cold. I like that about it.

I walk there from our house, sometimes scooter back, which is fun, and the route takes me past Sunset Lake through the neighborhood, all these Victorian and early-1900s homes that remind me a little of Ravenna in Seattle. Similar vibe, historic residential streets with houses that are all similar but each completely unique, trees everywhere, the kind of neighborhood that feels like it was designed for walking, but different. Jersey different, in the best way.

The Asbury Park Library isn't fancy, it's old and sort of run down and charming, but the system works beautifully. I can look up anything, and if they don't have it, they'll order it in from another branch. I place holds, I wait (never too long), and when the book shows up I walk over and grab it. It's like a concierge for my curiosity. Today I want Octavia Butler? Done. Last month it was V.E. Schwab. Before that, The Princess Bride — the book, which is a different and wonderful experience from the movie, in case you were wondering.

The People Who Read With Me

I should mention Book Bros.

My brother-in-law Wood and my friend Nick and I have a book club, Book Bros Book Club, and I built a whole website for it (that's a different post entirely, you can read about it in my Projects section). Not a lot of people I know read a ton, so having people who do, and who want to talk about what they're reading, is something I don't take for granted. We track our progress, write book reports (at least I do, those bums haven't yet), keep top-ten lists, do monthly reads and reading challenges. It's become one of my favorite things and let's me exercise my UX and coding skills while delving into the acceleration that is vibe-coding.

Nick even went and started another book club, this one at Harry's, the bar inside the Hotel & Restaurant St. Laurent in Asbury Park. Last month they did No Country for Old Men, and it was a great experience with cocktails thematically based on the book. It had a solid turnout, and even people who'd only seen the movie, like my Mother-in-law and my wife, could participate in the conversation and offer great insights. We got into the book-vs-movie differences, and it reminded me why reading the same book as other people and then talking about it is one of the best things humans do. It's just conversation with shared context, and it creates connections that don't happen when everyone's watching different TikToks.

This month at Harry's it's Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin, which I just bought off Thriftbooks.com (my favorite online book source), and here's the thing that made me smile -the copy that arrived is an old deaccessioned book from the New York Public Library! It's got the stamps, the card pocket, the slightly yellowed pages, the whole history of a book that sat on a shelf in New York City and was handled by who knows how many people before the library decided it had done its time and sold it off. Revel in revelry when I tell yous.

And now it's in my hands, in Asbury Park, about to get read again for a book club at a bar. It's doesn't get much sweeter than that.

The Drive Through Jersey

The other day Lynds and I were driving to the Italian market, and I should note that driving through New Jersey is its own kind of experience if you're from Arizona, because the roads here are almost certainly based on old horse trails. Major throughways just... go through neighborhoods. You'll be on your way somewhere that feels like you should be on a highway and suddenly you're passing someone's front porch. It's wild.

What I noticed on that drive, what I always notice, is how many libraries we passed. Small ones, brick ones, ones that looked like converted houses, ones with those little free library boxes out front. Every town has one. I wanted to stop at every single one of them, just to go in and look around, pick up books and smell them... weirdish sure, but old books have a smell and it's a good one.

I didn't stop. We had Italian meats to buy, but it planted a seed — I think I need a library bucket list. Not for the books, necessarily, for the buildings. For the experience of walking into a place that exists for no other reason than to let people come in and read for free. That's a radical concept if you think about it. A building funded by the public, open to everyone, full of knowledge and stories and ideas, and you can just... walk in. No subscription, no paywall, no algorithm deciding what you should see next. Just shelves and a library card. Books so many hands have held and so many minds have poured over.

What I Hope

I don't have a thesis here. This isn't an argument. I just love libraries, and I think about them more than most people probably do, and I wanted to write that down.

I hope they stick around. I hope the small-town New Jersey ones with the sleeping patrons and the creaky floors keep their doors open. I hope kids still get read to by their moms and discover the Boxcar Children and Hank the Cowdog or whatever the modern equivalent is. I hope someone walks into the Seattle Central Library for the first time and takes the escalator up to the Red Floor, feels the same jolt of what is this place that I felt in 2008, and then gets lost looking down through this wonderful building of books.

And I hope Henry Bemis — poor, sweet, heartbroken Henry Bemis — finds a new pair of glasses somewhere in the rubble. He deserves it.

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Returned three, picked up two. Net negative in books, net positive in everything else.