Fen, Bog & Swamp

 Annie Proulx, "Fen, Bog & Swamp", Scribner, 2022. pp. 100-101

I learned to read from recognizing the skeleton letters of words as my mother read me bedtime stories.  It fastened my life to books and long years of endless reading.  When I was in second grade I was excited to discover that the school had a library and every chance I got I rushed there to read and read until I was dragged or pushed out to the hatful recess playground.  One day I discovered a startling book, the tan cover showing a rocky bluff and a cave opening.  First published in 1904 it was The Early Cave Men by Katharine Dopp, one of America's early educators.  I looked long and hard at the sophisticated illustrations by Howard V. Brown, later famous for his early sci-fi covers.  I could not get enough of a drawing of two barefoot women clad in ankle-length skin dresses and fighting a bear at close quarters.  One slashed with a stone dagger, the other stabbed the bear with a spear.  Their expressions were intensely fierce.  You can't imagine what that picture meant to an eight-year-old girl who had already noticed that in books women were always pictured holding babies, crouching over a fire or handing food to someone.  Fighting a bear!  The book was wonderful too because it featured a map of the cave people's country.  It was the first map I had seen and it literally shaped the story.  The impression of Paleolithic life that book made on me has lasted a lifetime as I observed how the general population absorbed pronouncements from archaeologists,  historians and artists that emphasized the Eurocentric vision of male-dominated progressive technology.  Thinking of the women and the bear I knew the questions were not all answered.  

The Things I Would Never Do

Cailin Flanagin, "The Things I Would Never Do" Atlantic Dec 23, 2021 https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2021/12/cancer-teeth-loss/621103/ 

I came across Play It as It Lays in my high-school library when I was 16, and I cut two or possibly three classes to read it. God, I hated high school. I wanted to read, but they wanted me to sit at a desk and talk about “side, angle, side.” I found Joan Didion’s novel electric, bleak, ravishing. More than that: essential.

There I was, on the cusp of womanhood, of being a sexual creature—and in the nick of time, I had stumbled across this invaluable guidebook. In the girls’ magazines, all you ever read about was “boys who only wanted one thing” and how you should be grateful for strict parents, because imagine what would happen to you if they didn’t care enough to give you a curfew? But Play It as It Lays introduced me to what were obviously the real perils, the important ones that the adults were keeping from us. Bad, terrible, unspeakable things that I’d never even considered. Balling at parties! S-M! Yorkshire terriers!

I can remember whole passages from the book, but more than anything that series of she-would-nevers. Over the years, I have come up with my own list, ​​as square and tame as I am.

COMMENT

A work of fiction not only helps a teen shape her own adult identity, the experience of reading it has such a lasting impact that she uses it as the theme for an article  written many, many years later.  This narrative illustrates the long-term impacts of libraries.  Would Caitlin Flanagan have found Joan Didion if the school library didn't have it?

 

I Haven't Read Books by Cis-Het White Men for Years: I don't Miss Anything

 

Tika Viteri, I Haven't Read Books by Cis-Het White Men for Years: I don't Miss Anything. BookRiot.com July 9, 2021. https://bookriot.com/not-reading-cis-het-white-men/?fbclid=IwAR0D9yjnahMHdbJzZMZCdzyZrVQiP73IJ466wMthgZfzxExbflYwl25BUEo 

I’m one of those annoying people who taught themselves to read at age 3 (word up to Matilda Wormwood) and attempted to hide books under my pillow at night. The summer I was 5, my brother was born and I was bored, so I toddled my pre-K self half a mile down to the local library and tried to convince the librarian that she could, in fact, give me my own library card without my mom’s signature. She wasn’t having it, so I walked all the way back home, then back to the library with the completed application in hand. Someone from the local bar called my mother to let her know I was just walking around downtown by myself, and my mom said, “It’s ok, she’s going to the library.” It was a different time.

COMMENT

 I had a similar experience.  When I was 5 I wanted to get a library card for the school library, but the librarian refused to believe that a 5 year old could read.  She made me come in with my mother and read aloud from a book.  The book included the word "orphan" which I did not know and pronounced as three syllables:  "or-pa-han".   The librarian did not tell me I was pronouncing the word wrong until I had read the whole book and I nursed a grudge against her until I went to a different school. 

Shelf Lives

 Min Jin Lee, "Shelf Lives", New York Times Book Review,  April 18, 2021 p. 1, 20-21.

     On a day off, Uncle John went to the New York Public Library to check the classifieds.  He noticed that computer programmers had high starting salaries, so he borrowed books on programming.  the former history graduate student read library books on computer science.  Not long after, he got a job at an insurance company, then, later, I.B.M. hired him as a programmer, where he worked for most of his life.

     In 1975, Uncle John, now an I.B.M. company man sponsored his younger sister's family to immigrate from South Korea.  A year later, we came to Elmhurst, Queens, where Uncle John, his wife and their two American-born daughters lived.  I was 7.

     In our first year in America, Uncle John took my tow sisters and me to the library in Elmhurst and got us cards.   We could borrow as many books as we liked, he said.  We loaded up our metal grocery cart with its tilted black wheels and white plastic hubs.  It creaked all the way home.  

COMMENT

    This single narrative tells a complete immigrant story.  The public library is the pathway to a better job, which enables Uncle John to sponsor other family members to come to America.  In the article Min Jin Lee, reminisces about the library books she read as a child and what they taught her about "the ethos of American rugged individualism and the Korean quest for knowledge.  Based on what she learned from years of reading, she is writing a series of novels about Korean Americans, so just as it did for Uncle John, the library also provided a vocation for the author.

Elizabeth Acevedo

 "Elizabeth Acevedo" [By the Book], New York Times Book Review, April 1, 2021, p 6. 

Most people describe their childhood reading habits as voracious, no? And in my case it still applies. Mami would take me to library every Saturday and as I grew older she attempted to shoo me outside more since I could lie in bed and read the day away.  I wound up taking the books with me and reading on the stoop instead.  

I loved all thing.  The "Baby-Sitters Club" books, "Because of Winn Dixie," "Miracle's Boys," Jacqueline Woodson.  "The House on Mango Street" was a game changer, as was Julia Alvarez's "Before We Were Free."

COMMENT 

Acevedo is an author of young adult novels with a typical Coming of Age story of weekly trips to the library.  She describes the books she found there as "game changers."   

Library association awards Carnegie medals to McBride, Giggs

 

Hillel Italie, "Library association awards Carnegie medals to McBride, Giggs" Washington Post, February 4, 2021.  https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/library-association-awards-carnegie-medals-to-mcbride-giggs/2021/02/04/5a82f238-6735-11eb-bab8-707f8769d785_story.html

NEW YORK — This year’s winners of the Carnegie medals for fiction and nonfiction, presented by the American Library Association, have each checked out a few books in their time.

“I work from libraries a lot, and my wallet is full of library cards,” says Rebecca Giggs, an Australian author whose “Fathoms: The World in the Whale” received the nonfiction prize Thursday.

James McBride, the fiction winner for “Deacon King Kong,” has library cards in four different cities and wrote parts of his novel in branches in New York City and Philadelphia.

“In New York you can get anything you want but it takes longer because you can’t leave the library with them. But in Philly, you can,” explained McBride, whose novel last year was chosen by Oprah Winfrey for her book club.

...

McBride and Giggs each have strong childhood memories of libraries. McBride, a longtime New Yorker, would visit them often because they were a “safe space” and because his family couldn’t afford to buy many books. Giggs remembers her mother getting into aerobics “in a big way” and , a few nights a week, dropping off her and her sister at a library next door to the workout space.

Ghost stories were a favorite.

 

COMMENT

Authors describe using libraries as a workspace and to check out books.  

 

 

 

 

The Chekhov of Suburban Connecticut

Gal Beckerman, "The Chekhov of Suburban Connecticut," New York Times Book Review, July 12, 2020 p. 14.

     So deep is my remembered shame that men now, sitting at my keyboard at the age of 43, I'm blushing.  I know that times have changed, that today boys can like whatever they like, are even applauded for it.  But in the 1980's, when it seemed the only real option s for me were "The Hobbit" or the Hardy Boys or choose Your Own Adventure books, stories that as I recall all involved dragons and trap doors and motorcycle chases, sneaking home one of Ann Martin's books about a group of 12-year-old girls from fictional Stoneybrook, Conn., felt like a crime.  I mean, all of the covers were pastel. 

     It was a moment.  I think I read the first 15 books in the series over the course of fourth grade; whatever was in my school's library-- and I certainly didn't share my enthusiasm then with another soul.

 

 COMMENT

     The division between "boy books" and "girl books" is remembered as a shameful enthusiasm for books in "The Babysitters Club" series.  Luckily, these books were available from the school library.  How a 9-year-old boy worked up the nerve to check them out, the author does not say. 

     

Dream Worlds

Dream Worlds: N.K. Jemisin's Inventive Sci-Fi Defies Convention and Sells Millions of Books, New Yorker  January 27, 2020, pp 18-24.

Science fiction appealed to her at a young age.  Little about her real life was cohesive, but imagined worlds could be complete, self-contained, and bound by logic. I saw 'Star Wars' when it came out, because I was a creepy, obsessed space child," she told me.  Later she mined her local library for science-fiction novels; she covered the books in paper so that she could read them in class.

 COMMENT

     Young Jemisin wants to be a comic book artist and has to hide behind the school to exchange comic books with her white friends.  She seems to have felt a bit embarrassed about her reading preferences, but the comics and sci-fi had a powerful draw. At the time Star Wars came out, libraries didn't have comic books, but they do now.  Instead of hiding behind the school, kids can get comics from the shelves and go to comic conventions to geek out together.

   The library's sci-fi book collection inspired this author to write books that  earned three Hugo Awards -- not a bad investment in the future.

Cheryl Strayed

Cheryl Strayed [By the Book], New York Times Book Review, Feb. 16, 2020, p. 8.

About 20 years ago my husband, Brian, and I were in Antigua, Guatemala, when I became desperately ill with a stomach parasite.  For days, I could do nothing but lie in bed in the cheap hotel where we had a room.  Brian found an English-language lending library nearby that would allow you to check out two books at a time for a small fee.  He brought back the first two installments of Stephen King's serialized novel, "The Green Mile," and read them out loud to me.  When we were done, he returned them and checked out the next tow and so on until we'd gotten through all six.  Brian and I have a long history of reading books out loud to watch other, but that one was especially bonding.  His steady voice guided me back to life.
...
In elementary school, they used to hand out catalogs form the Scholastic publishing company that allowed you to order books that would then be delivered to you at school.  I'd study those catalogs for hours and meticulously fill out the order form on the back, as if I could buy them.  But I couldn't.  I never turned in the forms because my family was too poor to pay for the books.  It's such a visceral memory, aching for those books!  The public libraries and school libraries saved me, as did my mother's bookshelf.  I read everything that looked even a little bit interesting. 

COMMENT

 Not one but two library stories.  The first is about the relief of finding English books in a non-English country.  It helps to understand what a relief it mush be for people with non-English first languages to find non-English books in American libraries.

In the second story, a young reader is too poor to buy cheap paperbacks from the Scholastic catalog.  when I was a kid I was allowed to order books and I absolutely loved getting my new stack of them.  The books where printed on acidic paper and fell apart if you read them too many times, but that was mostly OK because the old ones quickly became too childish.

Larry Kramer

Larry Kramer [By the Book], New York Times Book Review, January 19, 2020.

What kind of reader were you as a child?  Which childhood books and authors stick with you most?
As a kid I as a voracious visitor to Washington's main public library. I loved reading plays that Arena Stage performed across the street.  Plays were more fun to read then.  I also loved the Hardy boys and Nancy Drew series.  Nancy was more fun.

COMMENT

    Hardy boys and Nancy Drew are standard choices, but the plays are not.  It's actually quite difficult to read plays and imagine what they might look like on stage.  Perhaps the fact that Kramer had already seen the plays was helpful.  It must have been fascinating to a kid that you could watch a play and then go across the street to read the source material.

Educated

Tara Westover, Educated: A Memoir, 2018.

Sometimes, when she was delivering herbs, if we’d finished our chores, Mother would  drop us at the Carnegie library in the center of town.  The basement had a room full of children’s books, which we read.  Richard even took books from upstairs, books for adults, with heavy titles about history and science.    Learning in our family was entirely self-directed: you could learn anything you could teach yourself, after your work was done.  Some of us were more disciplined than others. I was one of the least disciplined, so by the time I was ten, the only subject I had studied systematically was Morse code because Dad insisted that I learn it.  [p.46-47]

...

     I stared at them as if they were behind glass. I’d never heard anyone e use the word “feminism” as anything but a reprimand. At BYU, “You sound like a feminist” signaled the end of the argument.  It also signaled that I had lost.
     I left the café and went to the library.  After five minutes online and a few trips to the stacks, I was sitting in my usual place with a large pile of books written by what I now understood to be second-wave writers — Betty Friedan, Germaine Greer, Simone de Beauvoir.  I read only a few pages of each book before slamming it shut.  I’d never seen the word “vagina” printed out, never said it aloud.
     I returned to the Internet and then to the shelves, where I exchanged the books of the second wave for those that preceded the first— Mary Wollstonecraft and John Stuart Mill.  I read though the afternoon and into the evening, developing for the first time a vocabulary for the uneasiness I’d felt since childhood. [pp. 258-259].

COMMENT

   The first story from Westover’s childhood describes using the children’s collection as a kind of babysitter.  The kids were inconsistently homeschooled, and the shelf of library books didn’t compensate for a lack of educational direction.

    In the second library story Westover is enrolled in college and realizing how many things she doesn’t know about.  This time the library reveals its secrets. The books offer a vocabulary to talk about feminism that was not available in small town Idaho nor at a Mormon religious university. 

As the Ball Dropped, Our Life Fell Apart

Tammy Rabideaum, "As the Ball Dropped, Our Life Fell Apart," (Modern Love) New York Times, December 29, 2019, p.ST5.

     During Kristils' freshman year of high school, she announced that she wanted to attend a high-level college and began searching what was needed to be accepted. One summer day we drove to the library to pick up books she had on order. Awaiting us were three bins and some 60 books, many of them "how-to" manuals on getting straight A's, mastering standardized tests and winning admission to Ivy League schools.
     At home, Kristil lined them up in stacks along her bedroom wall, then mapped out her reading and study plan for the summer. 

COMMENT

     Despite a period of homelessness, Kristil eventually ends up at Barnard College with a full scholarship.  Some librarians are skeptical when a student like Kristil checks out more books than a person could reasonably read.  This story illustrate that someone who checks out a lot of books might actually be using them.  The librarians would surely be pleased to know how their library books helped get their borrower into the college of her dreams.

Sad Buildings in Brooklyn

Adam Gopnik, "Sad Buildings in Brooklyn: Scenes from the Life of Roz Chast," New Yorker, December 30, 2019, p, 32-

     "My mother didn't let me read comics growing up. She thought comics were morally low rent, for morons.  Superheroes, cartoons, animation-- didn't matter.  I had to go to a friend's house to look at comic books."  She points to two sources as essential to turning her love of drawing into there vocation as a cartoonist. One was Addams' work (from this magazine), which she first encountered as a child in the nineteen-sixties. "'Black Maria,' 'The Goaning Board,' 'Monster Rally,' 'Drawn & Quartered,'" she says rapturously reciting titles of Addams collections.  "These are books that I discovered at the browsing library at Cornell.  My parents used to go to Ithaca in the summer-- they lived in student quarters and it was cheap.  There were other Brooklyn school-teachers, mostly Jewish, mostly without children.  When my parents took me, they let me hang out."

COMMENT 

     This is the tale of the life-changing book, but also a coming of age when the unsupervised child discovers the books her parents won't let her read.   The library is also a refuge where a teenager with no friends can hang out.  

      The life-changing book is a classic, but at the Cornell Library it was in the browsing collection-- labeled as something just for fun.  Still, it works its magic, starting a girl down her career path. 
     

Tax Credit for Children Leaves Neediest Behind

Jason DeParle, “Tax Credit for Children Leaves Neediest Behind,” New York Times, December 17, 2019 p. A1-

     Money helps children in part because of what it can buy— more goods (cheesy chicken spaghetti) and services (gymnastics classes or tutors).  Ms. Bradford, the teachers’s aide, is so eager to invest in her sons that she has used tax refunds to send them on Boy Scout trips to 42 states— even when a flood left them living in her car “I’m trying to instill in them that it’s education that gives you knowledge and power, not cars or clothes,” she said. Before traveling to Washington and visiting the Vietnam Memorial the boys — Tony 17, and Micah 13— wrote a report on a Monroe man killed in the war, which the public library added to its collection.  Finding the soldier’s name on the wall, Micah said, “felt like touching history.”

COMMENT

     The article is about people who are too poor to get the full amount of a child tax credit.  In this example, the extra money helps buy educational experiences that aren’t available at public school.  The library is part of an education plan that includes schools, extra-curricular clubs, field trips and independent research. 

     The student work was added to the local history collection.  This kind of hyperlocal collecting is important for community identity.  What’s more, the library collection is a way to validate the importance of student research.  Academic libraries typically require graduate students to deposit dissertations and theses, but many also allow professors to submit selected undergraduate work for the collection.  In public libraries, display space is available for K-12 students to show off artwork and projects to the larger community. Since people without kids seldom have reason to go into a school building, the library becomes a link between students and community 

Electric Woman

 

Tessa Fontaine, The Electric Woman: A Memoir in Death-defying Acts, 2018.

    Story goes as a high school student in New Jersey, Tommy elided he wanted to be a circus performer, but a six foot two and possessing little grace or flexibility, his options felt limited. He didn't come from a circus family and didn't have the physique of a typical aerialist or tumbler.  What he wanted most of all was to wrestle an alligator.  When he learned about sword swallowing, he thought it could take him to the circus, the gators.
     He checked out a bunch of books on swallowing swords from the library and spread them across his bed, desk and floor.  Their illustrated pages provided step-by-step instructions and accounts of some of history's most famous sword swallowers.  He got to work.

COMMENT

     Nowadays would a wannabe circus performer learn his skills from youtube?  Or would he still go to the library to get those books about the most famous sword swallowers in history?   In the book Fontaine writes a scene where experienced performers try to teach her to swallow swords, so maybe the real trick is to learn how to swallow swords directly from another person. 

Original Man

Michael Schulman, "Original Man Why Do So Many Directors Want to Work With Adam Driver?" New Yorker,  October 28, 2019, pp 54-63.

"One time he snapped so sharply at a student who had used his yoga mat that he reduced the guy to tears. "I was, like, I gotta be better at communicating," he said.  He holed up at the performing-arts library and read plays by David Mamet and John Patrick Shanley, and found that drama helped him express his roiling emotions."

COMMENT 

The library as refuge and self-directed learning for a student destined to become a well-known actor. The library provides a foundation for an unlikely career. 

Delia Owens

Delia Owens (By the Book), New York Times Book Review, July 14, 2019, p.8.

When I was a child, I thought reading was something you did when it rained. I was a tomboy out collecting and releasing frogs and salamander or riding a horse named Strawberry.  When I was about 9, my friend dragged me into the library and while she was searching for a book to read, I stumbled into a display table filled with guidebooks for birds, insects, reptiles and shells.  In an instant my world of nature was connected with the world of words. 

COMMENT

     In this story serendipitously finding a book in a library display makes an impact on an outdoorsy child.  Guidebooks are an underappreciated source of inspiration for many people because of the way they seem to contain the observable world.  Though they are intended to teach people about unfamiliar things, guidebooks are especially wonderful because of the way they reflect familiar things in the observable world and reveal some of their secrets.  For instance, a bird guide shows you where the neighborhood birds go in the winter and maps of places where people never see those birds at all.   Birds can be one of the more disorienting aspects of travel likewhen you look up and see that white vultures instead of familiar turkey vultures, or a screaming flock of green parakeets instead of starlings, or notice a bright red cardinal when no such bird inhabits your home ecosystem.  Guidebooks are part of a literature of place and as climate change shifts the range of species they may become important historical records.

     Nowadays there are apps that identify birds, flowers, stars, and such, and GPS systems that make maps of where you intend to go,  but these seem to me to lack the depth of guidebooks.  For one thing, they declare an answer without the need to think through one’s own observations.  For another, instant identification lacks a larger context of interrelations.  I doubt that an app would help a child connect nature with the world of words, but Owens says that Roger Tory Peterson field guides led her to read Aldo Leopold, Peter Matthiessen, Richard Dawkins, Stephen Hawking, Edward Abbey, Rachel Carson, Karen Blixen and Charles Darwin.

How to Draw 'em In

Karen McPherson, How to Draw ‘em In: Here’s a Magic Formula to Keep Your Kids Reading Through the Summer. [Special to the Washington Post] Salt Lake Tribune, May 31, 2019, p. D1-

It’s a challenge for parents to make reading a pleasurable priority in their family’s life.  But summertime actually is a perfect— an crucial— time to experiment with some of the following strategies, recommended by children’s librarians and reading experts.…Many children’s librarians also recommend adding a “game” aspect to reading. Signing kids up for summer reading programs at the local public library is one easy way to do this.

COMMENT

     The paradox of reading is, it’s one of the most enjoyable of all possible ways to spend time but when kids have to read for school they resist.  Too much screen time also seems to be discouraging kids from reading. The Kids and Family Reading Report (2019) says that 14% of kids ages 9-11 read no books during the summer— double the number since 2016. [1] Reading is essential to educational success, and librarians are cited as experts on how to make reading fun again with the following strategies:

• Let kids choose
• Expand the definition of reading
• Make it a family priority
• Make reading social
• Make it a game

The writer also suggests signing kids up for summer reading programs.  It’s probably not just the prize incentives, but frequent summer trips to the library that encourage reading. Shelves of graphic novels are irresistible, even for many kids who think they don’t like reading. 

[1] Kids and Family Reading Report 7th ed. (2019).

Math, Taught Like Football

John Urschel, "Math, Taught Like Football," New York Times, May 12 2019 p. SR10.

     In elementary school, my mind wandered so much during class that I sometimes didn't respond when I was called on, and I resisted using the rote techniques we were taught to use to solve problems.  One of my teachers told my mother that I was "slow" and should repeat a grade.
     But my problem wasn't with math itself.  In fact, I spent countless hours as a child doing logic and math puzzles on my own, and as a teenager, when a topic seemed particularly interesting, I would go to the library and read more about it. 

 COMMENT

    A recurring theme in library stories describes self-directed research that enables someone to find their passion or discover an identity. This library exploration is notable for being independent of formal teaching, and in a few instances, specifically described as a reaction to active discouragement. [1]  Most teachers do try to encourage self-directed learning, by assigning research papers and such, but the structure of classroom teaching based on a core curriculum means students are always studying for a test.  

   These stories suggest that the library is essential to education not because it supports classroom learning but specifically because the knowledge to be found in library materials it is not limited by classroom learning.  One kind of coming-of-age happens when a child gets their first library card and can read whatever they want to; another coming-of-age happens when students realize that they are not limited by the authority-figure of a teacher.   In that sense, academic libraries have a neglected role in facilitating the transition from student to expert.  Colleges and universities award degrees based on a set of classes, but going to class is not actually the goal of higher education.  The goal is for students to move beyond the need for professors.  The pretense is that the transition happens by writing a dissertation or thesis.  In reality, the transition often happens at the library, even though nobody awards grades or credit for the achievement.  

  This writer went on to get a PhD in mathematics despite poor teaching.  It's not clear whether or not better math coaching would have resulted in better self-directed research, but it is clear that having access to a library compensated for the limitations of the classroom.  

[1] See Well Read, Well Known; How to Tap Your Inner Reader; Between the World and Me

To Walk is Human

Antonia Makchik, "To Walk is Human: to Reflect, Divine," High Country News, May 13, 2019 p.42.

     What walking has given me can never be distilled onto a Fitbit or calorie counting app. Rather, I am far more aware now of how my senses help my brain filter and interpret the vast sea of information constantly shifting around me, allowing me too not just move through the world, but to understand my own place within it.  I've seen the same transformation in my son: At 10, he started walking to and from school by himself, and realized that he could also walk to after-school karate or wander to the library or a friend's house and then home again without his parents.  Many of his friends who were driven everywhere didn't know how to get from one side of town to the other; a 15- to 20- minute walk.

 COMMENT

    When children find freedom at that library it is often because they have the freedom to choose what to read. The books don't cost money to borrow so kids can try things they might not like. A kind of coming-of-age happens in the transition from the juvenile collection to the regular stacks.

   This neighborhood library offers another kind of freedom since a 10-year old can get there  himself on foot or bicycle.  Adults think of driving as a kind of coming-of-age because the driver's license frees children from being driven, but the library card coming-of-age can happen much earlier in life.  It will be six years before this kid can drive, but he's already gaining a sense of independence and self-determination.  I agree with his mom, that's a wonderful thing.

   The article specifies that the family moved from an exurban home to a walkable town. Adults forget (or maybe never knew) that car-dependent infrastructure is a serious obstacle for people who can't drive or can't afford to drive, and that means all children.  Libraries are especially accommodating to children with juvenile collections and children's librarians, but it's also an important aspect of libraries that, in the right kind of walkable environment,  kids can go there even if they don't go with their parents.