It’s not easy being a book lover on the road. My parents (bless them) have several hundred of my books in storage in their garage, and yet I still shipped over two boxes of printed matter! One box of those were my diaries and notebooks and various works in progress. But I still also came over to Croatia with a box of books. In the three years since then, C and I have acquired many more. We have several full shelves.
Then there are our Kindles (we’ve never yet mixed ours up, although they’re identical – you get to know your Kindle, somehow). We each have hundreds of electronic books, super handy for when we’re travelling, or in a queue, or unexpectedly at the pub (it happens!).
And yet, and yet…
I still don’t have enough books. Luckily, Zagreb has several libraries, and I am a proud member. Every week I head to one of the nearby branches and borrow two books. Zagreb libraries have a surprisingly good selection of English language novels and non-fiction. I deliberately always choose one female and one male author, but quite accidentally I’ve also been choosing at least one non-white author. To say that my reading landscape has been expanded is an understatement. Frequent readers and friends will remember that up until a few years ago, I’d barely read anything written after 1955, very little by women, and almost nothing by writers of colour. Being at the mercy of the library has radically changed that.
It’s a change for the better.
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