In a world of overwhelming choice, I love the whittled-down book selection at my local street library | Jane Howard

8 hours ago 1

I am a voracious reader, but it is easy to feel there are too many books in the world. How do you find the time to keep up with all those new releases? To say nothing of the overwhelm that comes from even stepping in a bookshop. There you’re faced with not only the latest titles but also the classics you’ve missed and the biographies you hadn’t heard of but find yourself drawn to. The library is the same – the masses of books too frequently inspires inertia.

But around the corner from my house is the local little street library – a small wooden box with a plastic door, holding the donated books of my neighbourhood.

If the books have really been squeezed in there and piled on top of each other, it can maybe fit two-dozen books. In a world filled with overwhelming choice, I love this little whittled-down selection. There may be a book I want to read, there may not. But making that choice feels so much easier.

The little library provides a peek inside my middle-class neighbourhood. There is the person, or people, who have been clearing out their collection of diet cookbooks. The person who gets advanced reading copies and gives them away. The person who always drops off their copy of the Monthly, a month or two after it was released. I would love to know who seems to be slowly clearing out their collection of play scripts – and in doing so boosting my own collection. I’m interested in the people who drop off celebrity memoirs, the readers of the seemingly endless supply of sci-fi novels, and I wonder if the children have grown out of these picture books, or simply didn’t like them.

Through their selection of books, I feel I’m getting closer to the people in my suburb.

When I have only a limited selection to choose from, I often find myself turning over to read the blurb of books I haven’t heard of, books I possibly wouldn’t have chosen to glance at in spaces of more choice.

There are people in my neighbourhood with very similar taste in books to me, but they are tapped into different circles. And so I find books which are perfectly suited to me but, somehow, passed me by: books like Cho Nam-Joo’s delightfully weird novel Kim Ji-young, Born 1982, about depression and sexism in South Korea; or VV Ganeshananthan’s epic and sweeping, but still small and intimate, Brotherless Night, about the Sri Lankan civil war.

I get my hands on the huge books that came out a decade ago which I didn’t read at the time, and then they faded from consciousness. This is how I come to read Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch (now one of my favourite novels), Paul Kalanithi’s beautiful memoir When Breath Becomes Air and Maggie O’Farrell’s delicate The Hand That First Held Mine.

I’ve read books I would have never thought to pick up from anywhere else. A huge fan of Ann M Martin’s Baby-Sitters Club series when I was young, I love finding the odd copy of the graphic novel adaptations (illustrated by Raina Telgemeier), which I can pick up and read in half an hour, remembering who I was when I loved these stories the first time. Going through a reading slump, I find someone has cleared out a big selection of Jodi Picoult. I haven’t read her in 15 years, and picking up one I haven’t read before is a panacea. (When I go to read a second one, I find I have reached my fill, and turn my attention elsewhere.)

Not a huge genre reader, I pick out Richard Osman’s The Thursday Murder Club on a whim for an easy plane read. I devour it and am thrilled to see the next book in the series in the little library a few weeks later. I return the copies as I read them, and I imagine the private book club my neighbours and I are having as we read each one in turn.

I still buy the latest releases; I still use my library card. But there is something nice in the quietness of the local little library, the way it connects me to my neighbourhood and to books that aren’t front of mind. I drop by every couple of days. I see if the books I’ve contributed have been picked up; I hope there will be something new for me to embrace. More often than not, I don’t pick up anything new. But the books will be waiting for me the next time I stop by, slowly turning over, in this little reflection of where I live.