Library, Volume 2
Community Service
Lisa Cuddy wins the Rockaway Library Reading Contest four summers running-a major achievement in an immigrant community that considers education a cross between a contact sport and a winning lottery ticket. The year she turns eleven, the older kids complain; the librarians start counting the number of pages read rather than the number of books. She wins anyway. The following year, the librarians make her a member of the judging committee. No longer eligible to compete, Cuddy awards the prize to a fifteen-year-old boy who has read 1,127 pages less than she has. It is her first administrative act.
Local Boy Makes Good
The library at the Philadelphia Juvenile Rehabilitation Center (formerly the Quaker Home for Wayward and Orphaned Boys) is too small to require elaborate cataloging. The 30 or so volumes are just alphabetized by title. Always a fast reader, Eric Foreman figures he'll finish the whole lot within a month. In fact, he reads only one, the very first, a cast-off textbook called, simply, Anatomy. By the time he's released, he'd pretty much memorized it.
Occasionally, the PJRC counselors invite Foreman to attend their fundraisers. He always demurs, sends a check instead. Buy more books, he writes on the memo line.
Overdue Notice
House gets his first public library card at 36. He’d moved too frequently as a kid to qualify for one. Besides, why read when you can play outside? At age seven, he'd decided to simply remember every word he reads, thus maximizing playtime and minimizing homework time.
After the infarction, after three days of hearing him bitch about GH reruns, Stacy snaps: “Entertain yourself, Greg. Read a book. Go to the library, for God’s sake!” So he does. (That’ll show her!) It’s quiet and empty. No one tries to talk to him. Where has this heaven been all his life?