I have no grand plan when I enter the library - I merely search my memory for old intentions and see what grabs my eye

I’m a library person. I don’t know if that’s an actual type of person, but I am proclaiming myself one. I think I joined my first library at four, but it may have been younger – ours was a reading household, and my parents believed in getting us in the habit early. Years later, we would get into buying books, but my earliest book memories are of soft pages worn by many fingers before mine. And, of course, the lingering but pungent scent of the ink stamps marking return dates for all the eager eyes who got there first. The library, one of our great inventions, has always been a sustaining refuge: it’s a for ever kind of love.

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I moved to New York from London more than a year ago, but shamefully joined the library only in the last couple of months. I now have a Brooklyn Public Library card fob on my keyring (I chose the Maurice Sendak one, because I love a classic), sitting pretty next to my New York Public Library fob.

I have read so much since joining: plays by Lorraine Hansberry, the novels of Jamaica Kincaid and Teju Cole, poems by Lucille Clifton. I have no grand plan when I go there; I merely search my memory for old intentions and see what grabs my eye. Rarely, I browse carefully curated displays, or ask the librarians for recommendations. This week, I took out Roxane Gay’s recent short story collection, Difficult Women; Maggie Nelson’s autobiography of a trial, The Red Parts; and, to give my week an extra charge, a book of love poems by Pablo Neruda.

I also paid $9 in overdue fines. Because it turns out that bad library habits travel with you, even when you cross an ocean.