A few minutes ago I was on the net looking for that outstanding news that as a literary blog we should comment yes or yes. I came to Librópatas by chance, the great blog that two lovers of literature started and that is doing very well.
I started to investigate some of his posts and I found articles that talked about books to read before the age of 30, books that we have all read as children and things like that. This gave me the opportunity to ask myself the subject of what I want to talk to you about today. How do we access all those books that we should, should or should read?
I then remembered some interviews with writers in which they talked about how they accessed literature. Normally the first contact was through the small or large family library, depending on the case, and afterwards, the reading bug continued feeding in the Library.
Today I am going to confess something about myself that is deeply contradictory: I am a librarian and as a child I never went to the library. In fact, I think the first time I went to my municipal library was in high school to do a class assignment. I would be around fifteen years old.
The library at my school was not such. There were shelves with books in the Assembly Hall where two days a week a teacher, when leaving school, was there to make loans. The kids were crowding around and I couldn't stay because I had to take the bus, so I never made use of it. I remember the place as dark and with red curtains, since events were hardly held and it was drifting into a makeshift warehouse.
Thinking of this childhood and adolescence without libraries ... how is it possible that literature is something so important in my life if I never really had access to them? How do I like my library profession so much if I never used it until I started college at the age of 18?
My contact with literature came thanks to the fact that my father is a reading man and I have two older sisters who fed our small family library with high school readings and other books of personal taste.
As a child I remember reading and rereading Machado's poems from an old book by my father or looking curiously at a biography of Che Guevara.
He had the only municipal library, in a town of 60.000 inhabitants, half an hour away by car, an hour on foot. Buying books was a luxury in a family with a loose economy like mine, and even the bookstores were just as far away.
I always say that I am passionate about reading because I grew up watching people read, not because I had places nearby that fed my reading curiosity.
After telling this, I confess that I am envious when I read writers who say that they went to the library when they were little and that they had read everything that a child should read. I reread myself The Super Fox countless times because I had no other.
And faced with this experience, I am amazed at statements like those of a local politician who stated without blushing the least that «how they were going to invest money in the library when there were people who did not have money to eat«, response that she gave to the librarian to the request for funds to buy books for the children's section, which was obsolete and in a lamentable physical condition.
She could have answered that if a family did not have food, much less would they have for books and that is where the public library can intervene so that that child, because he is poor, does not feel deprived of education and culture.
But no, in many municipal libraries the librarians do not send, but the culture councilors who only come to take their picture.
We are in an election year and I am waiting to see what political proposals the parties put forward to revitalize an institution as extremely important to society as Libraries.
The truth is that they think of them as something to invest in in good times, because it is always good to open a library, but it is an unnecessary expense in times of crisis.
In short, I only wanted to reflect on the role of the library in the formation of the adult reader.