In praise of stories and old-fashioned libraries

 A few days ago, Joanne Harris, author of Chocolat, had an article published in The Guardian.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jan/05/barnsley-library-home-narnia-gormenghast-hundred-acre-wood

In it, she describes how it snowed so much once that she couldn't leave the library to go home. She was snowed in. At lunchtime, a librarian gave her a sandwich and in the evening, she was preparing to make a little nest in the corner of the library to spend the night in. Eventually, a policeman came to take her home. "But I am at home," she wailed.

I know what she means. Here is an extract from the article:

Later, when I discovered books, I realised that home could be Narnia, or Gormenghast, or AA Milne’s Hundred Acre Wood. Growing up as a bookish child, my natural home was the library: there I explored other worlds, other lives. There I could not only be myself, but anyone else I wanted to be.

That's my take on books, too: with your nose in a book, you can travel through time and space. You can live in the Roman era or fly through outer space in a rocket. You can have scary and daring adventures, and still be home in time for tea. You can read the most macabre tales and still sleep safely in bed at night. 

Apparently, it is a Czech proverb that says "Those who know many languages live as many lives as the languages they know."

You can say the same thing about books. If you read widely, you can experience many different lives. I used to read so many westerns by the British writer J.T. Edson that I practically lived in the Wild West. For two years of my Master's degree, I read so much about the Victorian era and so many books by Victorian writers that I feel I have lived in Victorian England. Thinking about that time still makes me feel slightly strange. Like a well-known place has now been lost forever. 

But Joanne Harris was reading in an old-fashioned library, with nooks where you could hide yourself away in. In the kind of library where people positively glared at you if you made the slightest noise. That's the kind of place where, in the silence, you can sink into another world - such as that of Narnia, the Hundred Acre Wood, Wonderland or the Magic Faraway Tree. Bliss.