Getting lost in the stacks again

The lost art of browsing for books

Last week, I read the first book in a historical trilogy set in medieval England, during the period when the English were still dealing with regular Viking invasions. Because my husband and I are fans of the shows Vikings and Vikings Valhalla, and The Last Kingdom, this is a period of history we’re sort of into. It was a book my husband had checked out of the library and which I read after him, a stunning reversal from the way things normally go in our house. We jokingly call my husband the book vulture, as he’s often poaching my shelf of library books for something to read.

“Where’d you find this?” I asked my husband when I was twenty pages or so into the historical novel. It was good. Was I surprised? Maybe.

“In the shelves,” he said.

Often when we go to the library together, I’m upstairs, looking through the shelves of new books or picking up my holds, while he’s downstairs, apparently browsing at random.

“You just picked it up off the shelf?” I asked.

“Yep,” he said. Was his tone a little self-satisfied? Maybe.

Was I both surprised and intrigued? Yes. It’s been years since I simply browsed the shelves of a library, but maybe it’s time to try it again.

In the town where I grew up, the nearest library was a twenty-minute drive away. There was only one library for the whole county and it was not a particularly large one. It was in Florence, the ‘big town,’ famous for its mall and it’s misspelled sign.

I loved the library, but it never felt much like a place I belonged. We drove there and in my childhood impatience, it seemed to take much longer than twenty minutes. It was not a beautiful building, inside or out, built in that sort of 70s brutalist style with few windows. It sat on a busy, two-lane highway. I remember vividly having to wait forever just to be able to cross the oncoming traffic to turn into the library. There was no stop light. Libraries weren’t important enough for that.

The place had nothing to recommend it except the books and even those were restricted. I don’t remember exactly how many books I was allowed to check out on my youth card, but I remember the limit being a source of real anxiety as I tried to strategize which books to take and which to leave. Even now when I look back it puzzles me that anyone felt it was a good idea to put restrictions on a child’s access to books.

Still, the library was my main book supplier. There was no Amazon back then. No Border’s. No Barnes and Noble nearby. Just Waldenbooks in the mall and the book fair at school and the library.

Looking back, I can tell you what I did and didn’t read. Yes to The Black Cauldron and Lloyd Alexander and Edward Eager. No to Sweet Valley High. Yes to Beverly Cleary and Judy Blume and Cynthia Voight. No to Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys.

What I can’t tell you is how I found the books I did read. There was no #BookTok or #bookstagram. I certainly don’t remember the library having the free magazine, BookList, which I often use now to figure out what to read next. During the school year, I studied that thin paper sheet they passed out before the book fair, carefully circling all the Newberry award winners (I was a literary snob) along with the occasional collection of Garfield cartoons (because…cat!).

Photo by Susan Q Yin on Unsplash

When I was a kid at that small and unattractive library, the youth section was fairly small. In my memory, it was really just one or two rows of shelves. That seems hard to believe until you remember that young adult back then wasn’t the thing it is now. This was before the explosion in kids lit that was Harry Potter. I doubt my library even made a distinction between middle grade and young adult. There were probably picture books, chapter books and then…maybe young adult? But there certainly wasn’t a lot of it and not a lot of people writing new young adult books. One of my favorite series, by Edward Eager, was written in the 1950s.

When I browsed the stacks as a kid, there were objectively fewer books to choose from. Later I graduated to adult books and the selection became larger. At that point I was mostly interested in mysteries (i.e. reading every single thing ever written by Agatha Christie) and science fiction (i.e. reading every single thing ever written by Issac Asimov). That narrowed the browsing considerably.

I’m still a fan of mysteries and science fiction/fantasy, but my library no longer has separate sections for those genres. Everything’s together in row upon row of shelves. The books are there, waiting for me to find them, but I’m not sure I remember anymore how it works. I’m not sure I know how browsing works. But if it worked for my husband, surely it will work for me?

It’s a little sad to admit that in 2024, browsing feels overwhelming. Browsing feels a little out of control. Our lives, after all, are so carefully curated now. Social media tells us what to look at and what we might want to buy. Mapping apps tell us the exact route to take from point A to point B. Google gives us the results it thinks are most suited to our preferences and our tastes. Like many people, I spend less time shopping in a physical store than I do shopping online. In a store, I may stumble upon something that no algorithm could’ve predicted I want. That’s probably not going to happen if I’m shopping online.

Anything could happen as I’m browsing the library stacks. It’s so random. It’s so exciting and also terrifying. With my grown-up library card, I can check out up to a hundred books (of course I asked the librarians what that upper limit is), but I still feel that old anxiety. How will I know which books are right? How will I know which books are actually worth reading? How will I not be overwhelmed by the endless possibilities? How will I decide?

Browsing the library shelves takes time and patience. Maybe that’s why my husband is better at it. He’s retired now. He has all the time in the world. Yes, it’s summer break for me, but that clock that is working life hasn’t stopped for me. It’s still ticking away inside my head, insisting that I certainly do not have the time to spend half an hour in the basement of the library, looking at books, many of which I won’t even end up checking out. Or maybe it’s just that I’m less patient in general.

Maybe that’s why browsing feels so strange now. It’s not efficient. It’s a leisurely activity. It’s haphazard and random. It is, in some ways, the opposite of an algorithm. There is no outside force dictating which books I pull off the shelves and which I don’t. There’s just which books are in the library collection in the first place and how they fit on the shelves. There is nothing systematic about it.

Maybe that’s why the prospect of browsing the shelves makes me feel like that kid again. Yes, a little anxious that Mom will run out of patience and say it’s time to go before I’ve made my final decision. Nervous that I’ll end up stuck with a bunch of dud books and have to wait a whole week to try again.

But also bubbling with the knowledge that each book is a doorway. What I am doing, standing in front of those shelves, is standing before the gateways to a thousand different universes. A thousand different worlds, each of them waiting to invite me inside. When I’m browsing the shelves, no one’s telling me where to go. I have to decide for myself. Anything could happen because inside the pages of a book, everything is possible. Yes, it might take some time to find the right door, but surely it’s worth it.