In Blue Jay, CA, the San Bernardino County Library brings great literature, reading groups, literacy programs, audiovisuals and warmth to this tiny mountain community that spawns its population three fold after Memorial Day to Labor Day and caters all year long to the beginning, visiting, insatiable, or older reader.  Since I consider myself a part-timer, visiting with a beginner’s mind, greedy for well-placed words and more mature, all my needs are met.

But, to make it even more delectable, they have a room in the library called The Corner Bookstore located in the far right corner of the building.  No sooner did I drop off my groceries at the treehouse, walk Cindi on her well traversed back road, give us both a little snack and fill the bird feeder for our friends, I was off and running to the village’s treasury of bound and written thoughts.

Delightful and adventurous, I spent at least an hour perusing titles, opening up tomes and leisurely choosing titles.  Alas, I came home with two dozen goodies ranging from New York’s Real Housewife Carole Radziwill’s memoir, What Remains to Willa Cather’s classics, The Professor’s House and My Antonia to Edith Wharton’s famous, The House of Mirth to Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Nobel prize winner, One Hundred Years of Solitude and everything in between.

Time spent selecting, skimming and then purchasing these gems was delicious; secluded and companionless, yet intimately snuggled up with the writer.  Isn’t that what every reader craves?  Isn’t that what every writer wants; to sneak into bed with you, to enter your head, your thoughts and transfer a visual, an emotion or a human connection?

Perhaps no place in any community is so totally democratic as the town library.  The only entrance requirement is interest. – Lady Bird Johnson