Wednesday, February 9, 2022

A Tale of Two Days, with Books

 On Monday I decided to give myself a pandemic treat: I went to a swanky grocery store in a neighboring town. It was fun. I love my local Food City, but every now and again want to spend extra money for fancy cheese or exotic produce, or at least something I haven't eaten repeatedly in past few months. We haven't been traveling, we almost never eat out these days, only 3 restaurants deliver to our farm, and while I enjoy cooking I have lately been bored.

I needed to hand in my library books and get fresh ones, and since I was headed to Johnson City, I decided to go to our branch library, Avoca, which was on the way, instead of the downtown library I usually go to. Avoca's tiny but lovely. I don't go there often, since the downtown library is on the way to ALI world headquarters. I sit on one of the boards at the main library, and I'm there every week, and nearly every employee there knows me by sight as Kimberly Brubaker Bradley, one of the two writers in Bristol. (The other is Jennifer Estep: you should look her books up, they're fabulous.) 

So I was anonymously perusing the New Fiction section at Avoca when I heard a man in his 60s say, angrily, "I need to make a complaint about the selections in this library."

As many of you know, I've been on a fulltime rant against censorship lately, so my ears perked up.

The man said, "Where is the new ---?" and he named some popular novelist I immediately forgot.

The librarian said, "Bert, I'm so sorry. I tried like anything to get it in last week, but I couldn't. And now we're getting a new check-out system so I won't have it until the first of March."

The man said, plaintively, "No new books for a month?"

The librarian commiserated, and said, "I've got two I can't wait to read, and no, they won't be in the system until March."

The two then started slanging on James Patterson, while I carefully selected a Nora Roberts novel. Nora Roberts just gave a grant to fund ALI in two West Virginia elementary schools next year, and I am a big fan. Then I walked back to the children's section and they had Fighting Words prominently displayed.

That was Monday. Yesterday was ship-out day at ALI. This is the day, four times a year, when we send our enrolled classes teacher sets of 6 books each. Their students will chose one title from what we send and order it for themselves, to keep. This year we have 186 classes enrolled, from North Carolina to upstate New York, so it's a lot of work. We get extra volunteers in and start early. It turns out our efforts to organize and streamline our processes are paying off: we finished the ship out in a little over 3 hours yesterday, including our lunch break. (Come work ship out day! We'll feed you free lunch.) 

Here's what we shipped out. Third grade: The Bad Guys (graphic novel), Who Was? (biography series, many different subjects), Unusual Chickens for the Exceptional Poultry Farmer, Power Forward, Coraline, and Wish. Fourth grade: Dog Man (graphic novel), Mummies Exposed (nonfiction), The Graveyard Book, Bud Not Buddy, Front Desk, and Aru Shah and the Song of Death. Fifth grade: Brave (graphic novel), Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, Brown Girl Dreaming, Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard, Amina's Voice, and Hoot. I wish you could have seen how beautiful these books were, stacked in piles, gleaming, bright. 

At the end of the afternoon some of the teachers from local schools came to pick their books up themselves. If they do this, thus sparing us postage costs, they get to pick out some free books from our shelves of books that aren't part of our school program. It was really fun to talk books with the teachers and learn what interests their students. Bright nonfiction is big. Graphic novels, of course. Rick Riordan, Dave Pilkey. 

If kids can get their hands on books that excite them, they'll read them. When they practice reading they get better at it. When they get better at reading they do better in school. They graduate high school, they have more options, they can get better jobs. Books are a way out of poverty.

But they're more than that. Books are a way into imagination. They're fantasy, adventure, space travel. They can take a person far away from their home, put them into other people's experiences, change their lives. 

Or, you know, just teach them a lot of fart jokes. But I'm okay with that, too.

No comments:

Post a Comment

The comments on this blog are now moderated. Yours will appear provided it's not hateful, crass, or annoying--and the definition of those terms is left solely to me.