this is a plea to keep libraries alive

*As a child I was irascible—easily bored, prone to tantrums, and always on edge. Luckily for my parents, they discovered a cure early on: books. We’d make weekly trips to the library, where I’d fill up a tote bag with as many books as it could hold. The bag was always so heavy that I’d have to schlep it over my shoulder like a bindle, which was only cute because I was at an age and size when carrying really heavy things was endearing rather than pitiful.

*I’d check out more than thirty books at a time and finish them all within a week. I’d often lock myself in my room, finishing seven novels in a day. I was the kid who read under the table at family dinners and was told my eyes would melt away for reading in the dark on in the car. I discovered early on that books had a palliative effect on my otherwise choleric temperament. Books became for me the tokens of comfort that stuffed animals were for many kids. Libraries and bookstores were both places of discovery and havens of refuge.

*There’s a part of me that refuses to believe in the possibility of obsolescence. Will books and libraries soon be, respectively, the LPs and the record stores that we visit with a nostalgic glance? Are they already mere emblems of authenticity, marks of a certain “type” of person whose usage of books and libraries avows a certain devotion to higher principles? Are libraries soon to be museums of objects rather than places where we go to borrow books?

*Already, the function of libraries is changing—but then again, perhaps they, like any institution, have always been dynamic. Many people have written about the library as a “third place,” a term coined by RayOldenburg in his 1990 book, The Great Good Place. Simply put, a “third place” is “a neutral social surrounding separate from home and work/school.” Specifically, Kevin Harris, who writes about libraries as being third places, writes, “all societies need places that allow informal interaction without requiring it, places that are rich in the possibility of the safe, mundane encounter…” Libraries can serve this function, but they should also be distinct from other places of informal interaction, like cafes and parks, in their focus and intent.

*If libraries are to survive, then they must be able to adapt to their own changing functions, or people’s perception of their function—and capitalize on their distinctiveness from other “third places.” Besides being a meeting place, the library environment should foster, if not an appreciation for books as objects of both beauty and experience, an appreciation of reading, learning, and the pursuit of knowledge. They should expand both the breadth and depth of intellectual exploration.

*One of my college professors, John Stilgoe—an eccentric man whose curmudgeonly facade could never truly obscure his absolute brilliance and kindness—said that the reason why he never sent research assistants to the library and did all book-fetching himself is because of the serendipity that that happens when scanning bookshelves. In the process of seeking one book, you find another, whether tangential or relevant, that might be even better than the one you were seeking in the first place. The same is true of a librarian’s expertise: human knowledge, memory, and association create strands of interpersonal discovery and sharing that we’ve tried to replicate in our digital libraries, without complete success. Serendipity is diminished, if not lost in algorithmic recommendations, and even the most personal of reviews online are less human than in a conversation, in a physical space. 

*Can the design of a library, then, facilitate serendipity and discovery while attracting the masses in an age where digital convenience is highly prized and sought after? Last week I visited both the Stockholm Public Library and The Royal Library in Copenhagen, both of which are grand pillars of design. To the credit of Swedish architect Gunnar Asplund, the Stockholm Public Library’s most notable feature is its rotunda, which though remarkable from the outside, is even more remarkable for the experience it creates for the visitor upon entering the library: the feeling of being enveloped in books, as in a forest, or a in a crowd. The modern design, which is both functional and aesthetically pleasing, creates a sense of monumental grandeur which does not preclude accessibility, which can often be the case in spaces that feel larger-than-life. In fact, Asplund intentionally implemented open shelving so that visitors could access books without the help of librarians; this democratization and access is at the very heart of the communal book-borrowing system.

*But in a day and age when borrowing books seems antiquated, if not superfluous, the best libraries serve other functions. One of the reasons I visited Lamont Library, when I was at Harvard, was to spend time in the Woodberry Poetry Room, which housed rare archives and recordings. The room also played host to readings and lectures, which were ends in and of themselves, but also means for people to become acquainted with library’s stock. The Seattle Central Library offers a list of the top ten things to do on its “Plan a Visit” page, which include “Enjoy exciting public art,” “tap into technology,” and “pick up a gift in the friendshop,” all of which are extensions, not origins, of a library’s function. The word “library,” after all, comes from the Old French word “librairie,” which means “collection of books.” But even if these functions are necessary for libraries to survive, they must also not eclipse the foundation of libraries: the books themselves.

*I say this because I love and romanticize books as objects. (My one flash of kleptomania was during the summer before third grade, when I stole Sweet Valley High books from the summer camp library; never has anything else even tempted me like books have.) But despite that love, I admit that I am also obsessed with my Kindle and visit libraries now for their architecture, aesthetics, sometimes their food, and very often their bathroom, which is true of my visits to the Stockholm, Copenhagen, and Berlin libraries.

*The Royal Library in Copenhagen seems at first glance to be a library only in name. Situated on the waterfront, the black marble and glass facade is a sleek backdrop for tanning in the sun, which is the preferred activity of many who visit the library. Besides the sun-kissed visitors, the library also houses a fancy, modern restaurant, a bustling cafe, and a concert hall, all of which could stand alone, as if the library were a mall or arcade. None seems to need the word “library” as a descriptor, as in a library cafe, or a library restaurant, or a library concert hall (in fact, those couplings all sound rather awkward), yet all incentivize visits to the library—at the very least, a reason to go inside the library after tanning outside. The structure, an eight-story atrium with wave-shaped walls and transversal corridors impresses more easily than its contents. Its modernity is a far cry from the beautiful University libraries I am acquainted with (Widener, most familiarly; Yale's libraries through Gilmore Girls episodes), but its structure's ability to captivate, the same.

*More than ever, we must recognize libraries as places of modernity, not antiquity, that we can utilize in non-traditional ways. It is only in doing so that we can perhaps keep their original purpose, as houses of books, intact. We rarely use the word "patron" anymore, but one of its root meanings, "protector," is an apt word for any book-lover's relationship to libraries, both public and private. In attendance and in finances, I want to patronize libraries. This is my love letter to libraries and the serendipitous discoveries we make inside: the books we find, the knowledge we devour, and the occasional human encounters. This is for all the times that books made me feel better, for all the times I escaped into libraries as a world unto themselves, for all that I've stolen and loved and read and learned. This is my plea to keep libraries alive.

this is dinner in stockholm: Nytorget

*We first met as naive, peppy freshmen at Harvard. More accurately, we were each other’s first college friends, thrust into the New Hampshire woods as strangers, later emerging from the Appalachian trail smelly and mosquito-bitten but inevitably as friends. We bonded while eating peanut butter and Nutella tortillas, a curious tube of summer sausage, and bags of GORP. Reduced to our bare essentials (the best and worst of ourselves), we didn’t—or couldn’t—care to impress one another. During that week, the most physically grueling of my life, we had nothing but each other. At the end of each day, when the purest exhaustion swept over us, we swaddled ourselves in our sleeping bags, lying like matchsticks under the stars.

*Having not only endured but enjoyed the wildest of trips with Noah and Jonathan, when they asked me to go to Europe with them, I said Yes. Well, I said Yes and then didn’t really act on it for a couple of weeks. But in a moment of desperation, sad and confused and in want of a physical escape, I bought a plane ticket to Stockholm, less than two weeks before the departure date. Lapses in logic can indeed be blessings.

*That’s how I ended up in Stockholm, Sweden, on a Monday night, with two friends whom I hadn’t seen in a year. That we would reunite, in a middle-aged Swedish women’s apartment was uncanny—yet that randomness—the way we improvised so casually and even carelessly—was the perfect counterpoint to my typical overwrought, over-devised plans.

*We read somewhere that Stockholm was the staid older sibling (“lovely, quieter,” with a “sly sense of humor,” if I remember correctly) to the more popular, fun-loving Copenhagen. A quirky yet accurate description that we found to be true. At night (a merely temporal term; the sun did not set till 10 pm), the streets were quiet and empty. But on the first night we went south to the Södermalm district, the neighborhood that tour books are currently calling “hip” and “trendy” (there’s always one of those), and sat our tired selves down at Nytorget, a restaurant-cum-bar attached to a fancy little grocery store called Urban Deli.

*Nytorget is a trendy, buzzing restaurant—the busiest in the area—filled inside and out with locals and young professionals. With wooden interiors, a moodily-lit bar, and seating areas at multiple levels, Nytorget is a choose-your-own-adventure place. Dine slowly and luxuriously al fresco or get a quick drink at the bar.

*Start with fresh oysters (all from Normandy, France), as we did, served with the usual lemon but also with delightful accents: pickled onions (which I mistook for horseradish, because when you expect a certain food, even when it tastes totally different, your mind belies your taste buds) and a tincture of homemade Tabasco sauce, to be applied with an eye-dropper. Trendiness is all about the kitschy details, but in a place like Stockholm, where beautiful typography and impeccable design are the norm, it’s not as easy to distinguish the hip from the merely functional in these aesthetic details.

*Continue the meal with a plate of charcuterie, graduating from most raw to the least raw. Intense concentrations of salt whet the palate well. Among the hams and prosciuttos are little gems of sugared, brandied olives, more sweet than savory, with a hint of horseradish.

*There's a variety of meats on the menu (including burgers, sourced mainly from the US), but for Swedish fare, order the gleaming Nytorget sausage, which is served like a bedded baby atop a nest of agreeably oily vegetables and new potatoes. (Though the potatoes may seem trifling and ordinary, trust me, the young potatoes are better here, and they're a Swedish staple. The flesh is buttery and smooth, with less grain and starch than your ordinary russet potato. They're also bite-sized!)



*Fresh seafood is a must-eat in Stockholm. The seafood stew at Nytorget is more delicate than the typical chunky affair, with a salty and mildly acidic tomato broth that is as equally tasty as the morsels it bathes: chunks of salmon, cod, mussels and little shrimp. Light, with diced carrots and potatoes you'll surely leave til the end.



*If there's any pairing instrumental to everyday Scandinavian food, it's the marriage of savory and sweet (much to my pleasure). The ubiquitous honey-mustard, an accompaniment to many a dish, is the perfect example of this. But an even shinier and perhaps more enjoyable example was this caramelized, brûléed goat cheese, nutty and mild, but with a tang that seemed to diverge from the typical goat-iness of goat cheese. This parchment-wrapped dish, a bundle of oily vegetables with hazelnuts and a dollop of creme fraiche, typified the vegetarian dishes I saw on menus: a handful of vegetables with a large cross-section of cheese. Smear this sugar-encrusted goat cheese on bread (you'll need a lot of this; this is a generous round), throw back a pale ale to wash it all down, and call it a good first night in Stockholm.