Library memories, part 2

Something I was getting at yesterday is that it was like each of the libraries had its own personality. While the books that I got there were partially a matter of how broad their catalog was, there is also an element of display and organization.

When I got to junior high and high school, I don't remember a lot of displays. My selections were more random because of that. At Five Oaks I remember just going to the Fiction shelves and scanning titles. Somehow this resulted in me reading a lot of Science Fantasy. It was there that I was introduced to Terry Brooks and Piers Anthony, whom I would end up reading much more of later. That was where I read The Wolf Bell and part of the Belgariad, but never finished either of those series. And I tried The Black Cauldron, but I just couldn't get into it.

Once at Aloha High School I seemed to try to get more serious, but it was often disappointing. I tried reading biographies of Anne Boleyn and Eleanor of Aquitaine. They were pretty interesting women, so it stands to reason that reading about their lives should be interesting too, but no, not they way those authors wrote.

I also tried reading The Magic Mountain my senior year. I didn't want to take AP English. I sort of thought it would suck the joy out of literature for me, and I was more interested in the Writing 120 and 121 sequence. There was also an English Literature class that one of my favorite teachers was teaching, so I took that regular English course as an elective.

That being said, I still wanted to take the AP English test. Most of my friends did take it, so checking out their reading lists was fairly easy, and the book that seemed to have the most prestige was Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, so I tried it and failed. Let me tell you, the reason getting through that book is such an accomplishment is because it is so tedious. It's hard to believe it shares its name with an amusement park full of roller coasters.

(In all fairness, I tend not to do well with translations from German, and that description of the tubercular cough has always stayed with me.)

I believe I chose wisely. I did well on the test, and my classes were good. Writing 121 was especially worth it. I continued to enjoy literature, even if there are less memories of great books from that time period.

If I did not check out a lot of fun leisure reading from the high school library, I nonetheless was able to acquire some books for my personal shelves there. They were having a giveaway one day and I came away with one book set in Egypt, two books set in Norway, two set in Ireland, and three set in England. They must have been purging books with foreign viewpoints.

All of this begs the question, did the Aloha High School library have less enjoyable books, or were they just harder to find? Plus. knowing that they had enjoyable books that they gave away to me, did something go wrong?

The other real coup from that time period was accidentally finding the old Aloha co-op library on the day they were having a book sale, and picking up the novelization of The Lost Boys movie. This meant that even though I have still not seen the movie, when I saw the play I got all the jokes.

I actually have one more memory of the Aloha High School library that is not book-related, but relates a lot to the '80s. I once set off the alarm on my way out. No, I wasn't steeling any books, but I had this metal belt, and as I was leaving the belt's interaction with my digital watch apparently created a magnetic field similar to the security system used with the books. I wasn't even that fashion forward!