feeding my bibliophilia

I must say, the U.S. public library system as I have experienced it from coast-to-coast is a wonderful establishment for which I cannot show enough appreciation. Growing up in Salem, Oregon -- a state capital that is surprisingly rural in nature in the eyes of a city kid from Taiwan -- the Salem Public Library was my home away from my two other homes (school and that other place my parents bought). My English improved as a result of the literally 50 or so books I would check out every week from the library during my first year as an immigrant; I would take them home, read them out loud to improve my pronunciation, and look up then memorize new English words. No way could I have been able to afford buying so many books in order to accrue the same amount of knowledge and other benefits as I did from the library. I also read all seven biographies on Joan of Arc that the library carried during my obsession with her, then with Robert Kennedy, and so on.

The Ann Arbor, Pittsburgh, and Seattle public libraries all rocked as well.

Israel's, not so much.

Okay, to be fair, I'm sure Haifa has great public libraries for Hebrew readers. But I have yet to find a sustainable and truly satisfying source to feed my reading habit. There's a library on Pevsner Street that I've heard about, but how to get there remains elusive (which bus stop? What number?) and I'm still cherishing its potential and not wanting to have my hopes dashed.

Meanwhile, book shopping at Steinmatsky (Israel's largest bookstore chain) is pricey, with most English books marked up to twice their US retail price. But I think I'm starting to hit a suitable arrangement, thanks to the advice of other English readers here to get books from the Book Depository and my husband's/his parents' very kind gift of a Kindle*.

So, today, I finally registered and synced up the Kindle and I see that Kindle offers a lot of free books daily. While these aren't books I normally go for, I am not as big a book snob as I once were. Living away from public libraries have humbled me in this respect. And these free books look interesting...of better quality than the free books that Nook routinely offers.

And I also ordered a book to be shipped from the Book Depository that couldn't be found on Kindle or Nook but I must have for this English book club I'm in. This UK company has free shipping *and* sells books at a discount pretty regularly. It was much cheaper than buying from Steinmatsky, so there's my new source for book purchases, should I desire something beyond what I can get free via the Kindle or Nook or able to check out via OverDrive at the Pittsburgh Public Library.

That's a lot of resources... (as I count them out now, four!) I think I am set for another year (or two) of living without a good public library nearby.

* It amuses me to recall that my brother had given me my first eReader, the Nook, shortly after Declan was born. And now that my second eReader, the Kindle, was gifted to me shortly after Petra's birth, I see the secret to obtaining another eReader someday**.

**So kidding. Having a third child just so I could get a new eReader is all kinds of lunacy.