I bring this up because I recently found myself driving behind the Library System of Lancaster County's bookmobile, which is part of a program that has been serving Lancastrians for 75 years.
My earliest bookmobile memories date to the late 1970s, when a bookmobile would come to the parking lot of our grocery store in Clayton, New Jersey. The town did not, to my recollection, have a library (Glassboro would have been the nearest), so the bookmobile was the most convenient way to access a wider range of books.
After that, we mostly lived in towns that had strong and nearby libraries and bookstores, so bookmobiles weren't as necessary to our family. But they remain vital to many communities in the 21st century and can serve an especially crucial role in developing nations. Check out this Piotr Kowalczyk rundown of "10 most extraordinary mobile libraries."
And now to the #FridayReads. My recent and current books include:
- Exit West, by Mohsin Hamid
- As the Crow Flies, by Melanie Gillman
- The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How it Changed America, by David Hajdu
- Sixpence House: Lost in a Town of Books, by Paul Collins
And here is the latest collection of curated links, for your reading pleasure, broken down into two general categories.
Serious stuff
- Vanity Fair: "Inside Trump's Cruel Campaign Against the USDA's Scientists" by Michael Lewis
- Medium: "Something is Wrong on the Internet" by James Bridle [Warning from Bridle: "Please be advised: this essay describes disturbing things and links to disturbing graphic and video content."]
- The New York Times: "On YouTube Kids, Startling Videos Slip Past Filters" by Sapna Maheshwari
- The Washington Post: "Want to raise an empowered girl? Then let her be funny." by Ellen McCarthy
- The New York Times Magazine: "What if Platforms Like Facebook Are Too Big to Regulate?" by John Herrman
- The Wall Street Journal: "How Smartphones Hijack Our Minds" by Nicholas Carr
- Pacific Standard: "The Touch of Madness: Culture profoundly shapes our ideas about mental illness, which is something psychologist Nev Jones knows all too well." by David Dobbs
- Los Angeles Review of Books: "Religious Liberty in a Fractured Republic" by Matthew D. Wright (The twitter pitch for this article was compelling: "Civil society should function as a realm of diverse ideas & communities, each attempting to model a well-lived life.")
- LancasterOnline.com: "Seiki Murono's story: From Texas internment camp to F&M football stardom in 1960s" by Tim Gross
Not-so-serious stuff
- The Atlantic: "The Time-Travel Delights of the Super Nintendo Classic" by David Sims
- The New Yorker: "On eBay, a Fantastic, Earnest World of Haunted Dolls" by Katherine Carlson
- The New Yorker: "Fantastic Beasts and How to Rank Them: The relative plausibility of impossible beings tells you a lot about how the mind works" by Kathryn Schulz
- AV Club: "A very special 1970s nightmare, starring Vincent Price, H.R. Pufnstuf, and the Brady Bunch" by Noel Murray
- Smithsonian.com: "Stereographs Were the Original Virtual Reality" by Clive Thompson
- The Atlantic: "A 600-Year History of Cookbooks as Status Symbols" by Henry Notaker
- The New York Times: "Sorting Through All the Laughs Joan Rivers Left Behind" by James Barron
- The New York Times: "Nnedi Okorafor and the Fantasy Genre She Is Helping Redefine" by Alexandria Alter
- Atlas Obscura: "Digging Through the Archives of ‘PURRRRR!,’ the Premier Cat Newsletter of the 1980s" by Cara Giaimo
The Bookmobile would come once a month to my elementary school. It was always exciting for me because I had access to books our school library didn't carry. There was no public library nearby. I don't remember when I stopped seeing the Bookmobile, but I would guess it was soon after our town finally got it's own branch of the country library.
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