“I don’t want to go to the library, it’s boring there,” one of the kids I nannied for a couple summers ago, didn’t know that with that one sentence, he broke my heart. As a child who used to spend enough hours in my local library to get paid for being there, the thought of any child not being excited to go was unfathomable to me. I remember curling up with Agatha Christie book after Agatha Christie book, racing through the summer reading challenge in efforts to prove to my favorite librarian that I was her most committed customer.
Looking back, my love for the library might have been unoriginally founded in the fact that I had no choice but to spend my summers there, as it had been nicknamed my dad’s “office away from his office.” Regardless of the fact that I had to spend all that time there whether I liked it or not, the library quickly became my refuge. Here I could lose myself in thousands of stories, all at my mere fingertips. Here I found my love for reading because I was able to sink myself into the life of someone else, somewhere else, even if just for a little while.Â
Yet, he had called it boring. Why? How? As I let that question sit with me, I tried to grope my way toward an answer, but it was unfathomable. I couldn’t imagine how a place that became like a second home to me could be considered anything but that. Yet the more I struggled with this question, the more I found a semblance of an answer, rooted in one core idea: kids just don’t read anymore. And you know what? As horrible as it is to admit, I really cannot blame them.
Why would they feel as though they need to read when all around them are devices which can supposedly tell them everything they “need” to know? How could they sit down to work their way through a book that doesn’t pick up until the third chapter when instead, they could scroll once on their phones to be entertained? I admit that I might sound like our begrudging parents, forever mourning the days before the “iPhone” but I’ve grown increasingly more concerned with the rate at which technology is developing, and has taken over our lives. This accelerated advent nudges a question that sounds almost too dystopian to be true, but whose presence can no longer be ignored: are books even necessary anymore?Â
Obviously to those of us who grew up in a time where technology hadn’t completely invaded every aspect of our lives, the merit of reading for its own sake wasn’t yet lost on us. The limited accessibility of the Internet and the consistent accessibility of books in hubs like libraries made the latter much more preferable. Yet with the advent of online resources, the necessity of books is diminishing. Why take the time to go to the library and check something out when you could access the very same thing from a screen without moving an inch?Â
Yet, it’s not the same thing. In fact, I would argue that the whole argument for the existence and longevity of libraries hinges on the idea that reading something from a screen and holding a physical book are two completely different things. There is infinite research that highlights the quantifiable benefits of books over electronic renditions, but I would rather argue that there’s just something more inherently human about reading a book. Holding a book connects us to each other in a way that a computer never could, and never will. Libraries are the places that this transcendental connection is able to occur and why we can never allow them to become obsolete. So the next time that feeling of boredom crops up, it is not the library we should be running from, but the library we should be running to.