ON LIBRARIES

Niall Williams, History of the Rain: A Novel (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014) ("What none of us realized and what at first of course Virgil didn't realize either was that the library he was building would in fact become a working tool, a consultancy, and that it was leading somewhere. He had no intention of writing. He loved reading, that was all.  And he read books that he thought so far beyond anything that he himself could dream of achieving that any thought of writing instantly evaporated into the certainty of failure. How could you even start? Read Dickens,read Dostoevsky. Read Thomas Hardy. Read any pages in any story of Chekhov, and any reasonable person would go ah lads, put down their pencil and walk away." Id. at 260-261. From the "Acknowledgements": "My father believed in education, at a time when education meant books. Twice a month he took us to the library, and those visits remain among the most cherished memories of my growing up. Apart for the browsing and the borrowing, just to be for an hour in the physical company of so many books was inspiring and moving in a way that is perhaps ha4d to explain day, but which for which I will always be grateful" Id. at 357.).