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Nothing Like a Good Read

I'm proud of my husband. We both really enjoy reading, and we love bookstores. For probably the first six years or so that we were married, we spent a lot of money at bookstores. A lot of money that we could've been putting toward bills. But now, we don't. For me, I don't take the time to read that I used to, so I haven't been in the market for a new book recently.

However, my husband still reads -- not as much as he used to because finding time when you have a 5-month-old is tough. When he came across a book he wanted to read recently, he wrote down the title, author and ISBN number for a book he wants and took the info to our local library and requested it through interlibrary loan, a program through which libraries loan books to each other for patron use. Hundreds of libraries participate, and for most, it doesn't cost anything.

I think most people are not aware libraries will do this. I didn't know until I worked in one. Odd, isn't it, that it never occurred to me to get my books that way when I was spending so much money on them?


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