There is a witty and critical piece by Alan Bennett on his fear and love of books and libraries in the London Review of Books. Go to http://www.lrb.co.uk/v33/n15/alan-bennett/baffled-at-a-bookcase
The final paragraph is especially good.
Armley Library, Leeds
Thanks for posting this Kirk. Like most people I am an admirer of Alan Bennett’s writing and this piece with its multitude of references to Leeds is particularly resonant. Privatising libraries or turning them over to the ministrations of the ‘Big Society’ may well be a long term aim of the Conservative Party (I understand the Addingham village near Ilkley is having meetings to try and organise volunteers to keep their library open). But the affects of the closures on the development of children’s imaginations and of a critical capacity can be enormously damaging. To paraphrase George R.R. Martin “A reader lives a thousand lives before they die. The person who never reads lives only one.” Many people get the capacity for a sociological imagination vicariously through reading literature rather than studying sociology as an academic subject. Exposure to literature is a great help in seeing the possibilities of other ways of life, other values for living and to see beyond the dogmatic ‘certainties’ and the ‘there is no alternative’ persuasions of the government of the day.
Copied and pasted from Twitter: Times column on libraries, “the cathedrals of our mind – where you are a citizen, not a consumer.”