The article is from Real Simple – November 2016 issue,
titled 5 Reasons the world is still a wonderful place by Liz Loerke.
Photo Credit: Elaine Perez
Libraries Still Exist by Caitlin Moran (excerpt)
When you’re a child, if your home is perhaps unhappy or else just cramped or dull, and you are too poor for the mall to hold any appeal for you, there is a third, magical space you can go to on a rainy day: the library. A place where you can go without a penny in your pocket and be given a room full of worlds. For each book is a doorway you can walk through into another land. There are a million people, from across the world and through time, who are sitting on those shelves, dying to tell their stories and become your friend. It is a place where you will be valued not for what you wear or how you look, but for how many words you have collected and stored in your head (corybantic, uxorious, shagreen, mimosa). Most important, it is a place where you can just sit on a chair and read all the rude bits from Judy Blume books. And we invented these facilities! We made them happen. How cool is that? This humanity’s greatest achievement.