Not My Local Library
Before I get into why I love the library, let me start by welcoming you to 2016!
I hope you had a great 2015 and an awesome time on New Year’s Eve. Kate and I were planning on just staying home and having a relaxing night, but our friends Chris and Kris told us they were going to Queens to their friend’s place and have a very low key new year’s eve reunion, then we decided to join them.
Our night was low key, but it was pretty awesome. We had some drinks, ordered some food, played board games, and spent some time with good friends. It was a great night overall.
We stayed over in Queens and had to wake up early on New Year’s Day so we can go to my mom’s house and have brunch with the family. After brunch, my brother, his wife, my brother in law, and I went to the 1:00pm show of Star Wars. My favorite part of Star Wars was when… just kidding – no spoilers.
I hope you also had a great New Year’s. Now it’s time to set the alarm clock because it’s back to work time… sad face.
Why I Love the Library
Books
Last week I mentioned how I met one of my goals for 2015 – Read at least 12 books during the year. I just wanted to read a little bit more than I did the previous year and setting the goal definitely helped me read more.
Once I started reading a little bit every day, I started knocking down one book after the other at a faster pace than I thought I would do. My plan was to read one book per month, but I ended up reading two, three, and sometimes four books per month. I not only met my goal of 12 books, but I smashed my goal and ended up reading 30 books this year.
To me, 30 books is a lot of books and it could get expensive if I were to buy all those books. That’s were the library comes in.
Out of the 30 books I read, two were purchased by me this year, four were here at the apartment – either Kate had them or I had them from before. The other 24 books I borrowed from the library. So the reason #1 why I love the library is because it saved me a lot of money last year.
Guidebooks
Kate and I always try to take at least two vacations every year. This year was no different. We went to the Dominican Republic, Nashville/Great Smokey Mountains/Asheville, and India!
When we go someplace new, we like to explore as much as possible, and guidebooks make exploring a lot easier and safer. India is a little crazy so we ended up going on a guided tour, but even there, we had some time to explore on our own and used a guidebook.
I don’t know if you’ve noticed but guidebooks are expensive and for the most part, we use them only once.
Two years ago we discovered that the library has a big section of guidebooks. So ever since then, we haven’t bought a guidebook. We just borrow them from the library, take it with us on vacation, and bring it back when we are done.
Passes to Museums
Besides having books, guidebooks, movies, music, internet, etc., libraries – at least our local library – have free passes to selected museums!
We live in New Jersey, but our town is pretty close to New York City, so we not only get free passes to some New Jersey museums, we also get free passes to some NYC museums.
We don’t get passes to ALL the museums, but we get passes to Grounds for Sculpture, Montclair Art Museum, and Liberty Science Center in New Jersey; and The Guggenheim Museum, The Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum, and The American Museum of Natural History in New York.
I think that’s pretty awesome and yet another reason why I love the library.
I’m not sure if all libraries offer passes to museums, but I would ask if I were you. At our library, all passes are for two or four people plus any children under the age of 18 – within the household.
If you haven’t visited your local library in a while, maybe 2016 is the year where you can check out all that your library has to offer.
Hoopla
Our library also gives us free access to Hoopla, a website that has a ton of music, movies, and audiobooks for streaming. We watched a lot of documentaries on Hoopla that were not on Netflix/Hulu/AmazonPrime/HBOGo, and listened to whole music albums.
What perks does your library offer?
Aldo, just stumbled across you site and love the name of your site! I’m also a huge fan of libraries and it’s a cause that I support each year. I love libraries for the simple reason of giving rich knowledge freely to those willing to go out and access it.
At our local library they have computers for the kids and several great story time programs which I love. I also noticed I’m able to now checkout e-books through our library cards which is pretty cool. 🙂
As a young child in the Bronx, the Public Library was my oasis. I remember when I got my first library card, I was so proud. I would always take out an arm full of books (I think the limit was 5)
My sister who just wrote a book was invited to bring her book and do a book review with teens. Also, they liked her book, and it is on the library shelf today.
We recently used the library to get discounted tickets to the zoo by checking out the Atlanta zoo DVD. What’s not to love??
I often
I often succumb to kindle, only because my GF has an unlimited account, but there are definitely perks to the public library, and untapped potential, thanks for shedding some light on it.
It’s amazing that so many people don’t use local libraries. You’re paying taxes for the libraries, so you should take advantage of this.
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I love the library as well. Its a thing thats really underestimated these days. People used to go to the libraries to get their knowledge, now they get it from the internet. But still libraries contain alot of knowledge that gets removed on the internet or is almost impossible to find. You should spend more time in libraries!