The Shame of Lolita

Last week I looked for Lolita on the shelf at the public library.

I had also looked the week before. And a few weeks before that.

It was never there.

I began to wonder if maybe the Wake County Public Library system just didn't have any copies. I wondered if it were banned or something. So I went online and found that the library did, indeed, have copies of Lolita. Not very many. Some are lost and some are checked out to book clubs, but there were a few floating around the system. I placed a hold on one.

During lunch today I went to pick up the Lolita they were holding for me. Claiming it from the hold shelf, I handed it to the lady behind the desk, along with my library card. In the time it took me to put my card back in my wallet, she had checked the book out. It was when I reached for Lolita that I noticed the look she was giving me.

I'm still not sure what the look meant, but it was no longer the friendly, quiet, library-lady smile I'd gotten from her when I first walked up. My first instinct was to interpret her look as disapproving, maybe even offended. Later, I thought that maybe she was looking at me thinking, "Poor thing, she probably doesn't even know what it's about."

Whatever she was thinking, she wasn't happy with me.

Books for Free

As I pursue my ongoing life goal to make my way through as many books as humanly possible, I find it's best to not pay for them.

Naturally, I get books from the public library fairly often. When I do buy books, I always buy them used, usually spending no more than $3 even for hardbacks. But the library is one of my favorite sources because not only do I get to read for free, but when I'm done with a book I get to return it rather than find a bookshelf on which to squeeze it. My local library offers both paper books and audio books. I check out three or four books on CD at the time and listen to them on my commute.

When I want to listen to an audio book on my iPod, I don't buy one or even transfer it from CD to the mp3 player, which would be horribly time-consuming. I go to Librivox.org and download pretty much any classic book I care to listen to. There is no cost and Librivox offers over 4,000 recordings, all of works in the public domain. The only downside is that anyone can sign up to read a chapter or even an entire book. Not everyone who reads is a native English speaker and even those who are often mangle words they're not familiar with. For the most part, I really enjoy the recordings and have even found some that are excellently read.

For text copies of public domain works, Gutenberg.org is a great choice. Their ebooks can be read on a computer as well as a Kindle or other reading device.