>> I can't believe you're asking that. I refuse to answer that. That's like
choosing a favorite child or something. I respectfully refuse to pick just one.
All right, let me tell you this: when I was growing up my very favorite books
were A Little Princess and The Hobbit, both of which my parents read to me so many times that
I was officially banned from ever requesting they be read to me again. How about that?
>> Oh, this is a little cheesy. I love Calvin and Hobbes and the book that I read every
day because it's in my bathroom, it's a Sunday morning, afternoon collection. So it's just his,
Bill Watterson's collections of his Sunday afternoon cartoon or comics. That's just the
book that I read all the time. I can flip through it at any page, makes me smile, makes me laugh.
It appeals to anyone in my family no matter what their slant is on religion or politics,
you pick up that book and it's just really accessible so I'd say that's my favorite.
>> I don't know that I can narrow it down to one. There's different ones for different seasons.
If I want to revisit childhood favorites, there's the Wrinkle in Time trilogy.
I like revisiting certain worlds is more of the
thing and so I'll go read a Terry Pratchett Discworld or Louise Penny's Three Pines. I have
a lot of favorites but a lot of times it comes down to like the place as well as the characters.
>> Out of nonfiction I would have to say it's a college textbook that I
bought when I was in the ninth grade: the second edition of The Dinosauria.
It's an expansive book on dinosaur taxonomy, evolution, basically everything you need to know.
>> I liked Crime and Punishment. It was a tough read but learning kind of the
psychological side of things and how, you know,
the stress of guilt can kind of eat you alive literally, that's pretty interesting.
>> In preparing for this, I kept thinking going back and forth between
different books because it changes every day. I ended up deciding on A Thousand
Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini. It's a really beautiful insight to Afghan culture
and it's just so well written and has so many raw emotions to it. It's a very wonderful book.
>> Well, once again because it is a wealth of information. We have a wealth of past
and present information that we can share and we can help with and we can
direct people. I don't think people realize how much the Library is involved in things like that.
>> So libraries exist solely to benefit the community and it's one of the few places
that you can go that you're not expected to buy something, to pay rent for being here.
Everybody can come in here and is equally welcome simply for being a human being, for being a
member of the community. It truly is I think an important sort of bastion of equity and community.
It's, to me represents some of the best things about being in a community.
>> I don't know how many phone calls or visits I get a day of people asking me about current
events. They maybe don't have the access or the resources otherwise to know what's going on in
their community and a lot of times we get calls about meetings or news articles or how do I,
you know, plan this kind of a trip? And we're able to point them in the right direction,
you know, give them the information they need and a little bit better than Google,
we can really narrow it down for you. You don't just put in,
you know, "trip to Orlando" and get a million pop-up ads. We're going to be able to show you,
okay, if you're going to Disney, this is the books that show you how to plan your trip to Disney.
So we're a little more concentrated and effective in giving you exactly what you need.
>> We are like, I've been thinking of it as a great equalizer. We provide internet access to
those who can't afford it, we provide tech help to those who are completely tech illiterate,
we offer resources to people who don't have anywhere else to go, we
offer a warm, safe space for people who don't have that and it's just a great
place where everyone can come and be equal and have equal access to everything that we offer.
>> Libraries are an essential public service because
I've been to different parts of the world where people don't have access to libraries.
We're really fortunate that we subscribe to taxing and using dollars to pay for public institutions
like libraries because not everybody has access to all of the same information or the same
technology and so we can increase the quality of life by having institutions like libraries around.