Trust me, I know this title sounds pretty dramatic but just hold on one second!! This year, I’ve sworn to enter my fiscally responsible era. No more spending money on overly expensive lunches at the ARC every day, I can make lunch at home myself. No more impulse buying Starbucks; instead I’ll make my vanilla lattes in the comfort of my own room. However, if I need a coffee but I’m running late for class, well that’s why I waited for an hour at Divison and Johnson on a cold December morning to get my free red reusable cup for my homemade coffee. Finally, I’m done with buying books. Instead, I got a library card.
Am I always on Pintrest looking at those huge floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and wishing I had that? Yes, of course. But as a silly university student on a university budget, the English major room decor of my dreams isn’t really an option at this very moment.
When I got back into reading a few years ago, my parents were always asking why I needed to buy my books instead of just getting a library card, and I never had a real reason for them. It just felt different. It’s not like I enjoyed collecting books or anything, I was quite impartial to the idea of having so many books and I really didn’t have the space for them. To be honest, I read a book once and then it’s incredibly rare that I pick it up and read it again. I’ve even read some of my favourite books only once, but I still own them. The only book I’ve ever read multiple times is The Catcher in the Rye. I’m politely asking you not to look into how that makes me a red flag because I love it.
I don’t even annotate my books. I went through a little phase, but again when I read the book once, I was just kind of like “cool… what now?”. You can’t resell books that have been annotated. I’m actually still regretting writing in my copy of Anna Karenina because my expectations for finishing it were too high. I only got 150 pages in and now I can’t even sell it because I made some dumb comments in the margins.
So, when I got back to Kingston for winter term, I finally said enough is enough. And off I went to the Kingston public library to get myself a library card.
Despite the fact that I haven’t used my library card effectively yet, I don’t really understand why everyone isn’t in their library card era. I’m calling it now, library cards are in for 2023—you heard it here first. I’ve only had my library card for two days, but I honestly feel like a whole new person. I even spent all day yesterday just reserving books I would’ve never bought on my own. As someone who isn’t too familiar with the memoir/non-fiction genre, I absolutely love the idea of just trying all these new styles of texts but not needing to commit to the cost of the book itself.
Obviously, not everything can be perfect. The one downfall to the library is that if you want any books that are relatively popular at the moment, you will have a little bit of a wait time to get them since they are in such high demand. However, I am choosing to see this as both a positive and a negative. While you wait your turn for the most talked about book on BookTok, you can give the random book with a cool synopsis a try. The library is genuinely the perfect place to broaden your reading horizons.
I still love a good stroll around Indigo. I totally understand book collectors, and maybe one day that will be me. But for now, I’ve come to the conclusion that I’ll only buy books I absolutely love and will want to read more than once. If I read a new book at the library that really changes me, then I’ll make the purchase. Or if an author I love comes out with a new novel (Taylor Jenkins Reid, I’m looking at you and the entire Riva-verse), then I’ll pre-order those. But other than that, if you’re a fairly casual reader like myself, make the trek to your local library and register for a library card. You’ll be opening yourself up to so many new genres and saving a pretty penny while doing so.
