This post is part of a series in which I describe the twenty-four books I read in 2018 for Book Riot’s Read Harder Challenge.
Task: Read a children’s classic published before 1980.
This is such a damned good book, and it was every bit as gripping this time around as it was the last time I read it a quarter of a century or so ago.
I’m usually bothered by nostalgia when it comes to libraries (just stick with this train of thought for a minute). I work in a busy public library, and I know the value of what I do. However, I’m not sure that people with fond library memories who don’t actually use the library today quite get what my actual profession entails.
Don’t get me wrong, any children’s librarian worth his or her salt should give a child an impression that our days are spent being kindly and putting exactly the right book in young people’s hands at exactly the right moment. And we do that, for all ages. It’s one of most of my colleagues’ favorite types of library interaction. Buuuuuut there’s more to it. A LOT more to it.
First of all, we’re not all children’s librarians. Over on the adult side, the job involves anything from providing community tech support to helping schedule visitations with incarcerated family members to genealogy research to legal and medical self-help and research to handling mental health and substance abuse issues professionally and compassionately. The truth is, most of us love books as much as you’d expect, but at its heart this is an information profession, and our razor sharp book recommendation game is only one blade in the Swiss army knife of our skill set.