American libraries are unusual institutions. Provided you’ve got that little plastic library card, you can check out almost any book. Sometimes you can request any book at any library in the county or beyond, including books in the local public colleges. Even the smallest library usually contains more books than any one person could read in a lifetime, on any subject. You’ll find books written by people you agree with and books written by people with whom you vehemently disagree, books of which you disapprove and books you wish everyone would read because they’re so indisputably correct, books you love and books you hate. And even the books you hate are books you also love because they’re books!

A recent period of disability forced me to cut back on my usual habit of buying a dozen or more new books every month. The truth is, my personal library contains enough unread volumes to last me until I die, but the truth also is that there are new books being published every month that I really must read. Of course, I’m being completely irrational, but I don’t care. I only know that nothing makes me happier than a new book (except, of course, my husband, who loves books as much as I do). I cannot live without a constant new supply.

So my financial circumstances forced me to the public library for the first time in a decade. I was pleased to find that my city had just built a lovely new library, and had not made the mistake many cities make in doing so: it had remembered that libraries need books as well as computers. The library is nicely designed for the 21st century, with special attention to computer stations, areas for use exclusively by young people, and even an outdoor reading area, but it also has stacks and stacks and stacks of actual books, with plenty of room for growth.

I visit my library several times a week. Usually I don’t get past the new fiction section on the first floor, where I’ll often find some literary fiction and science fiction that I want to read (new mysteries are harder to get your hands on, and usually require placing a hold, paying $.75, and waiting – I still haven’t gotten Jeff Lindsay’s new entry in his Dexter series, Dexter in the Dark, even though I requested it almost two months ago). The new nonfiction is one floor up, and sometimes I get lucky there; most recently, I picked up a copy of The Best American Short Stories 2007, edited by Stephen King, as soon as it came out.

Just today I picked up Robert McCammon’s new horror novel, The Queen of Bedlam. Michael Palin’s well-received Diaries 1969-1979: The Python Years also awaits my perusal. In fact, I’ve got some 40 books here at home awaiting my attention. No, I probably won’t get to all of them before they’re due. I’ll return them to the library for a time, and then check them out again after everyone else has had about a week to go after them and hasn’t.

I probably appreciate libraries a bit more than most people because I know a little something about what goes into running them. In the mid-1990s, I served on the Board of Trustees of the Omaha Public Library. It was an exhilarating and sobering task. Patrons constantly complain that you do have this book on the shelves, or you don’t have that book – sometimes even the people serving on the board. Censorship isn’t a joke to librarians, it’s a reality. Arguments with local governments over who really runs the library, the government or the librarians, are constant and have real consequences. Dealing with the homeless who use the library as a warm place to pass a cold winter afternoon is another huge problem. So are unattended children, especially those who are sent to the library to fill up that time between when school lets out and their parents return home from work. Add to these somewhat prosaic but very real problems the additional technical problems of booming technologies and the explosion of information and you find that librarianship has become a very challenging profession.

There’s an old story, probably apocryphal, about an adult in the late 1940s showing a new young German immigrant to this country that a copy of Hitler’s Mein Kampf was on the library shelves. This is what freedom means, said the adult; freedom means that ideas are free, even the ideas of your enemies. When you understand those ideas, you can fight them, and you can win. The free availability of knowledge is something basically American, as valuable as our freedom of speech and religion. While it may seem that my use of the library to read mysteries, horror novels and short stories fails to live up to these great ideals, I would argue only that I have Susan Faludi’s new book, The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post 9/11 America on hold – and it’s got quite the waiting list. So here’s my special thanks to libraries and librarians. I couldn’t have made it through this past summer without you. Please keep up the good work!