by Alicia Rudnicki, Library Mix

Books are like seeds containing so many possibilities — from blissful escape to immersion in valuable information. To make the contents blossom, all we have do is take time to read.  

Giving a copy of a book you love to a reluctant reader or someone who has limited access to books is an act of nurturance similar to improving the soil in a garden. It aids growth.

This week, tens of thousands of World Book Night volunteers in Europe and the United States planted helped the joy of reading grow in places ranging from beauty parlors to prisons. Each volunteer, including me, distributed 20 copies of a favorite book chosen from a long list of quality bestsellers. This added up to 2.5 million books.

World Book Night is the largest book giveaway event in the world. Although I handed out my books today, most volunteers distributed theirs the evening of April 23, which marked the second annual World Book Night in England and Ireland and the event’s first time in the United States and Germany.

So, although a bit tardy, I celebrated what I called my “world book afternoon” today by dropping 20 copies of one of my favorite books, like seeds, in the hands of students at a youth detention center. I gave them a memoir about an extremely difficult yet hopeful childhood, The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls.

Participation made me feel wealthy yet cost me nothing, except some unpaid time off from work.

The British and U.S. World Book Night organizations are nonprofits that make the giveaway possible through donations. Participating authors forgo royalties. Publishers, paper manufacturers, printers and others donate funds and services to produce and ship the books to libraries and bookstores where volunteers pick them up.

Eventually, World Book Night organizers hope to add other countries to their project aimed at fostering love of the printed page.  

Good reading has always helped me to relax and get away from worries. It heals me when I am down and helps me drift off to sleep a happier person.

Young people in youth detention centers have plenty of worries and little freedom. Although restrictions in youth centers are necessary, they are wearing. Basic rights that most teens take for granted don’t exist, such as boys and girls not being allowed in the same room. Simple materials, including pencils and paper, aren’t allowed beyond classroom doors due to concerns about inventive weaponry.

I discovered that being given a book for one’s limited collection of personal property is a big deal even if a guard must transport the book from classroom to dorm. It is yours, and you don't ever have to return it to the library. When the book is in your hands, you are free to wander its pages.

A book is a safe place where you can go when nothing seems to be going right. And for the volunteer who put it in your hands, it is the gateway to a garden of good wishes for a better life.

by Alicia Rudnicki, Library Mix

The Pattern in the Carpet: A Personal History with Jigsaws, by Margaret Drabble, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010,
ISBN 978-0-54-738609-6
Available at Powell's Books

When stuck between a rock and the sheer high face of a seemingly insurmountable problem, there are a number of ways that I cope. These include watching quality television, reading and working puzzles. I'd like to cry, but I'm not good at it.

Sopranos and Mad Men
One year, to redirect the anger I felt about unfair treatment at work, I visited the library to check out DVDs of the entire, breathtakingly violent Sopranos TV series. My husband and I were comforted that Tony and Carmela Soprano’s hellish lives were not our own.

Last autumn, we found respite from the  not-so-great depression (GD II) in similar trips to the library for DVDs of Mad Men. We were sucked into the dark of Don and Betty Draper’s 1960s home and propelled into the brightness, creativity and corruption of Madison Avenue as we blended a crazy cocktail of old episodes with the new season.

Margaret Drabble
More often, I seek a different kind of fiction therapy at the library, bringing home piles of novels. I admit to being what I think of as a lopsided reader. Except for the endless factual research I do for my writing, I seldom read non-fiction.

 Yet I have been drawn to a number of non-fiction books in the past year, including Margaret Drabble’s unusual The Pattern in the Carpet, A Personal History with Jigsaws, which I discovered — where else — at my local library.

Drabble wanted to create a glossy, harmless history of jigsaw puzzles and other games that would avoid painful family controversies. She reasoned that thinking about puzzles and games would aid her escape from the anxiety and cabin fever of helping nurse her husband through cancer.

It did, but not before transmuting into a difficult memoir, involving recollections about an eccentric but beloved spinster aunt devoted to jigsaw puzzles.

Puzzle therapy
Previous to discovering The Pattern in the Carpet, I theorized that people are drawn to puzzles, in part, as a form of therapy — a way to sooth themselves by succeeding at putting together the pieces of a picture, reorganizing the letters in a word jumble or decoding a cryptic message.

Drabble validated my thinking, while at the same time showing that any topic can lead to turmoil. However, as she wrote, “Jigsaws are a useful antidote to anger.”

Similarly, solving a crossword puzzle can help one avoid cross words and completing the daily Sudoku can lend a feeling of logic to the illogical, disturbing days of GDII. A walk to the library doesn’t hurt either.