Library Books

I love getting books from the library to read just for fun. As a college student in general, and an English major specifically, reading for fun isn't something I get to do very often. At about this time every year, I get tired of being told what to read, and I make a rebellious trip to the stacks on the fifth floor of Strozier Library and pick something. When I'm feeling extra rebellious, I hide in the Goldstein Library (Children's Literature) and forget that I'm a college student at all.

So the reading for fun bug hit me this year and I picked up Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak. I'm really enjoying it. I loved the movie when I saw it again last year, and I wanted to read it, because as anyone can tell you, the book is always better. I love his words and images. In the first eighty or so pages, there have been at least five times when I've stopped and thought, "Wow, that was a really amazing line." I'm only about a fifth of the way through it, but so far, it's delicious.

I was flipping through the pages idly the other night when I noticed writing. Faint pencil marks crammed into the margins expressing the thought of someone long ago. The book has been in the library for more than 25 years, and I can't help but wonder what the other people that read it were thinking. Someone scribbled a poem in the back of the book. I don't know who wrote it. Maybe it's another Pasternak poem that the editors neglected to include, or maybe it's an original that the poet wanted read by someone else, whether it was published or not. Maybe it's a pastiche of Pasternak poem. But I can't help wondering.

That's why I love library books. They are shared. They've touched someone else's hands and been dropped as the reader drifted off to sleep, shoved in a backpack next to a textbook that has seen far less wear, chosen over assigned reading. I like books. I think they all have their own story.