I love to read. I’ve tried eBooks. I don’t like them nearly as much as a “real” book.

Saturday, my husband and I went to our local library for the first time since moving here to Riverton, Wyoming. We’ve been here three years and I was a little embarrassed to admit that to the librarians who helped us.

We each got a library card and then we took a tour. It’s a really nice library. I found a book to check-out. It’s by Neil Degrasse Tyson and is titled “Death by Black Hole.” I began reading it Saturday afternoon and was immediately enchanted by it.

I didn’t always love to read, but I’ve always loved books. I had a number of “instructional” books with lots of pictures in them that my dad got me when I was very young. There were three that were my favorites. One was about birds, another was about horses and the third one was about dinosaurs.

My parents were not much into reading. But my mom’s mom, Grandma Daisy, loved to read. Mostly she read romance novels. This led her to name a number of her nine children rather flamboyantly. My mom was Flora Belle. One of her brothers was Earnest Malvern and another was Edsel Ford. A couple of my aunts were named Iona Mae and Elvaretta Fay.

Grandma Daisy would send me books for birthdays and Christmas. Mostly they were books in the “Bobbsey Twins” series. I tried to read them. Really, I did. I could just never get into them.

It wasn’t until around age 7 that I discovered graphic novels (then they were known as comic books) and I discovered that I actually did love to read. I mostly read super hero comics, but there were a few others thrown in like “Archie.” Whenever I had a few extra cents saved up, I’d buy a new comic book. My collection wasn’t huge, but it was cherished. I loaned some of them to my sister until I got them back with crayon colorings all over them. Then I stopped lending them to her. I still have them all somewhere in a box. They’ve moved with me everywhere I’ve lived.

I learned my first “big” word in a Batman comic book. The word was “distorted.” The artwork helped to define the meaning.

Around age 10 or 11 years old, I met a girl who read a lot of science fiction. She was a voracious reader and would lend me books as she finished them as long as I had them back to her in time for her to return them to the library. I discovered I loved science fiction. I also learned about the library.

It was in a strip mall. It had taken over a couple of the spaces there. It was an old and musty building but I thought it was heaven. It was a couple miles from home and I would walk there early on a Saturday morning every other week with my paper sack full of books to return.

The librarian was an old woman to my young eyes. She was quiet and kind and very helpful. When I read everything of a science fiction nature in the children’s section, she directed to me books she thought I might like in the adult section. There were a great many more of those. It was wonderful.

Eventually, the library got its own new building and was quite a bit closer to home. I could go there every week if I wanted and I pretty much did. By the time I graduated high school, I had read every science fiction book that small library had.

I earned money by babysitting so I wasn’t rich, but I had enough that I could buy a new book from the book store at my community college every now and then. I still have some of the first books I ever bought. But many of them have found their way to various libraries and second hand shops over the years.

Even so, my husband and I have a fairly extensive library of our own. And over the years, I found that I not only enjoy science fiction, but also mysteries and thrillers and fantasy and a lot of non-fiction.

It had been a long time since I was last in a library. I didn’t know how much I had missed them until yesterday. I felt like a kid again. I was enchanted. All those books. Right there. Just waiting for me to find them.

Books are amazing. They are imagination made manifest. Books elucidate and illuminate. Whether fact or fiction, they can show you the impossibly small to the incredibly huge, the perfectly mundane to the awesomely sublime. They can take you places you’ve never been and show you places you could never hope to see. Having a book is like holding the universe in your hands.

Photo and quote courtesy of mirabile dictu and Parade respectively