The Dealer in Your Neighborhood

I was talking to a librarian the other day and she laughed when I said I thought librarians were like drug dealers.  But they really are! They even target the little kids! Get them hooked on the picture books, next thing you know the kids are applying for library cards and mainlining Harry Potter, Divergent and TheTesting.  Give it a few years and YA just won’t give the same buzz and the kids have to move on to bigger and bigger fiction.  And that’s when the librarians start pushing the hardcore stuff – Faulkner, Atwood, Joyce. If you’re not careful your kid could end up reading the entire Lord of the Rings even though there’s a perfectly good director’s extended cut blue ray back home.

And just like pushers, librarians are extremely open-minded.  They don’t care where you’ve come from.  Rich, poor, or in between – all library cards are the same to them.  (Unless it’s an out of state card, in which case you will have to pay the buck and get a local card.)  They don’t even judge when all you want to read is Romance novels; they just point you toward the romance section and recommend new authors who also write in the kilt and dragon milieu.  It’s a slippery slope, my friends. You go into the library for the videos and the free internet access and the next thing you know you’re reading and using words like “milieu.”

So, if that kind of blatant pushing of mind-expanding education is acceptable to you, then you should probably hug the next librarian you see.  Just remember that the VIG on those late library books is due next week…