The thing I miss about working in a public library is the access to books and time to read them. New books magically appeared for me to read, and I had long lunch hours/Saturdays/desk time to gobble them up. Schools are a little different; there’s a lot of lesson planning and administrivia going into the one-woman show that is my library. The books don’t appear unless I order them, and really that just happens once or twice a year. If a new book is published that I just have to have for my library, it goes on the list for next year’s book order. That’s a lot of time to wait, so I still spend a lot of hours at the public library and Barnes and Noble trying to catch up on everything out there. And when I arrived in my current job the periodicals had all been ordered for the year, and I couldn’t get my hands on School Library Journal or Publisher’s Weekly. Next year hopefully I’ll be able to work one of those into an order. So as much as I’m reading, I still get blindsided once in a while by the huge number of books I still haven’t read.
Archive: January 23, 2009