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My neighbourhood is incredibly spoiled when it comes to Little Free Libraries.
There’s a particularly good one near the end of my street that even has a hook for your dog’s leash so you can page through books with two hands. The other morning Phoebe (my shih tzu, if you are new here) and I met a woman and her dog, and I noticed she had the copy of Pride and Prejudice I’d been eyeing in the library tucked under her arm. When I passed by moments later, I spotted a book I’d been wanting to read for a while — Souvankham Thammavongsa’s Giller Prize-winning novel Pick a Colour — and nabbed it. I walked home with my pup and my book in the sunshine and felt… great?
It’s amazing how cup-filling these tiny acts of community — dog greetings, books from a library stocked by neighbours — are. They make me feel like a real person in the world instead of an avatar on a screen.
Little Free Libraries are tiny utopias in the dystopia. (John Woods / Free Press files)
There is a lot of truly dystopian stuff happening right now when it comes to literacy and media. It’s harder to find news articles with a simple Google search; Meta is still blocking the news on its social media platforms for Canadians. Just finding long-form, juicy stuff to read is hard in this new era of “pivoting to video”; even podcasts — not reading, but still — have to have YouTube channels now.
Then there’s the revelation that AI company Anthropic was buying and destroying (sorry, “destructively scanning”) books in bulk — especially those, in a horrible bit of irony, published before 2022 so they wouldn’t be “contaminated” by AI slop — to train Claude, its LLM or large-language model.
There are still book bans in schools. Libraries all over North America are seeing cuts to their hours, their funding, their staff.
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Little Free Libraries are tiny utopias in the dystopia. Making literature of all kinds available for free, for everyone. There are no ads or algorithms or fast-moving, short-form content competing for my attention at these little labours of love, just spines of books (or magazines) you might like to read, waiting to be discovered.
And then there are actual libraries, which feel like miracles. “OMG, have you heard about the library!?” I always feel like screaming at people every time I am reminded about all you can access there. It practically feels revelatory, in this climate, that you can borrow media, physical media, that you can hold in your hands, and share it with the rest of your community.
I believe there will always be readers and books and readers of books. Libraries, little and big, make that belief possible.
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