I don’t generally buy books. There’s a perfectly good library system in my city that lets me check books out for absolutely free, and I make use of that extensively. There are only a handful of books in my apartment that are here to stay, and even those aren’t particularly likely to be read again. Buying books to read once and never look at again isn’t a particularly attractive value proposition.

I realized, though, that there’s another reason that the library is more appealing than owning books (besides being free). There’s a sense of urgency inherent in a short-term book loan that isn’t present in a book you own.

Last summer a library near me had a book sale, and I bought about a dozen books for maybe five dollars. To date, I’ve read exactly half of one of them. In that same time, I can’t even count how many books from the local library have been checked out, read, and returned within a few days. Dozens.

I deliberately make much more time to read when I know the book has to be returned within (generally) three weeks. Not that it necessarily takes three weeks to read a given book, but I tend to bounce between activities fairly quickly, so I only really read a few chapters at a time before moving on to something else. Knowing that the book I’m reading now has to go back to the library tomorrow (and can’t be renewed because it’s a “new” book in their system) and that I’m only halfway through it means I’m going to take a sizable portion of my afternoon and spend it in the park with this book until it’s finished.

And since I then consciously dedicate more time to reading, I go through books faster and and more frequently than I otherwise would. Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six is still sitting half-read on my bedside table. There are three library books stacked on top of it, all of which are almost done.

Oh. Yeah. Reading those. That was my plan, hey? I should probably get to that rather than sitting here writing a blog post.

Photo by visibleducts. (License: Creative Commons)