This week’s Booking Through Thursday question asks:

Whether you usually read off of your own book pile or from the library shelves NOW, chances are you started off with trips to the library. (There’s no way my parents could otherwise have kept up with my book habit when I was 10.) So … What is your earliest memory of a library? Who took you? Do you have you any funny/odd memories of the library?

My mother started taking me to the library as soon as I could read. She’d drop me off in the children’s section and then go find some books for herself. She did this knowing full well that the books in that section would keep me occupied until she had made her selections. The library also had a summer reading program, which I was always happily enrolled in. By that time I had my own library card, more like “passport to fun” and I enjoyed checking out as many books as possible. Sadly though, they didn’t have a very big kid and young adult section. At least not when I was young anyway. Because I remember that by 3rd grade I had read everything in the young adult section and had moved on to other parts of the library.

This fact annoyed some of my teachers as it meant that when they picked books to assign us for reading, I had already read them. Or, they were really easy to read for me, since I was reading at a higher reading level, and zipped through them faster than anyone else. Eventually I got teachers who thought to actually challenge me, but that’s a story for another time.

Here’s a funny thing about our library, the third floor is where they had the offices as well as a small art gallery and conference rooms. There would be political meetings and government shingdings going on up on that floor, but because of it having the gallery, it was open to the public. When they had their banquets I would just waltz in like I was someone’s daughter and help myself to the free food.

Now, because my mom worked and I could spend hours happily at the library without getting bored, my mother used to drop me off there sometimes while she did her errands. As such, I got the layout of the building really fast and the surround area as well. You see, I also liked to spy on the homeless people who would come in and spend hours in the library, reading, to escape the heat outside during the summer. I had a little notebook, binoculars, and a tape recorder in my backpack. I would watch them from behind the shelves and when they left the library I liked to follow them and jot down their activities. Weird, I know.

Now, as you know, I can hardly stand to go to the public library. Being charged fines for books checked out on a stolen library card that you reported, and they supposedly canceled in their system, years ago does that to a person.