Life and Times in the Stacks
By
Kylie Adkins
My friends and family often find the fact that I work at a library absolutely magical. And though I often have to explain that I am not, in fact, a librarian, I can’t deny that it is often magical.
As one of the only Pages (read: shelver) at my library, almost every book that is returned passes through my hands. For an avid reader with too little time on their hands, this can create quite a sizable problem in the form of a hefty backlog—my bookshelf can hardly hold any more books. But sometimes, the library just proves the power of happenstance, and the allure of the rabbit holes it can lead us down.
Just last week a book came in (Rule 34 by Charles Stross) that led to a great conversation with a coworker that unlocked a piece of an essay I am working on. This book looked terrible, but we were reminded of another book that we’d seen by the same author called Saturn’s Children. Through the course of looking up this book, I came across a term I’d never heard before: “Gynoid.”
I hate this word the way that some people hate the word “moist.” A gynoid is simply a female android, because for some reason we need a weird word to describe what could be a genderless entity. But if the meaning behind the word weren’t bad enough, the mouthfeel is just atrocious.
I’d already had this idea percolating about a couple of stories that centered around lady robots, so this new trope—that I discovered purely by happenstance—has now contextualized what I planned to write. My coworkers and I also had a good laugh about oversexualized alternative names for the male “android.”
Because the books I shelve tend to be based off patron returns, the selection can feel entirely random. Yet, I am always surprised at the ways the books I take a deeper look at have some thread tangled into my life.
When I picked up The Time Traveler’s Wife I did not anticipate Henry to be a librarian—in fact, this was the first of three books I read that month about librarians at the Newberry Library in Chicago. I had just started at the library, and it seemed like librarians were everywhere! Here’s Interlibrary Loan by Gene Wolfe and The Memory Librarian by Janelle Monae.
It’s not uncommon to have any random book I’ve thought about reading recently to be returned and pass through my hands. This may be a large system, but I am always surprised at how much my taste aligns with other people in my immediate vicinity.
Sometimes we fall in love with a book at first sight. I found myself one day enamored with a wonderfully surreal cover that evoked Georgia O’Keeffe. I stared at the cover a long time. Checked the title. Read a sentence or two of the description. Attempted to put it on the cart to shelve so someone else can fall in love with it.
But I couldn’t do it. This book, its cover, ensnared me with its siren song and I couldn’t let it go. So, I brought home I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman. It had me so enthralled that I put it before any of my required reading, and I absolutely fell in love.
Falling in love with a library book like that, though? It’s rough. You have to return it so that someone else may become enamored and subsequently heartbroken. Maybe you loved that cover, or that introduction.
You may see it again, here, at the library. Maybe you’ll find it in a local bookstore or order it online to make sure it is exactly the right edition that originally stoked that fire. But still, you must first let it go.
Being a library Page is strange in a way, though. Because I don’t work on the circulation desk very often, I don’t get to know our patrons in the same way. I rarely see them. I never know their names.
But I know that my community is reading, a lot. And I know what they are reading, and it’s all good stuff.
It can be hard to find the time to slow down, to window shop. But it is so worth it to let yourself wander. Pick up whatever calls to you. And if something refuses to be ignored . . . give it a try. See what it has to say. Find the thread that tangles with your own life.