Alas, alack!

I have lived in four cities: Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada; Victoria, British Columbia, Canada; Kochi, Kochi Prefecture, Japan; Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. All of them are provincial/prefectural/state capitals. About 300,000 people live in each of the first three, and many million in the last. I like them all, but there is one thing about Regina that I have missed ever since I left in 2004, and will miss as long as I live. Yes, I know my true love.

It's the Regina Public Library (oh-so-fondly let us call it the RPL). I miss it with a passion. I miss the woman in the Bothwell branch who asks me every time I go there whether my father has bought me a car yet (she remembers me from the ten-book stacks I borrowed as a child), I miss the weird things that appear in the Dunlop Art Gallery in the Central branch. I miss the garbled digitized voice on my parents' answering machine, informing the household that the book on hold for "Arlyza" has arrived. (If they didn't already know my schedule, my parents could probably plan for my arrival on visits home by waiting to hear that message.) I miss it because it's the best library I have ever encountered. I miss the reference section. I miss the massive collection of unabridged audio books, on CD and cassette tape. I miss the multiple copies, spread out nicely one at each branch, of popular books. I miss the graphic novel collection, from which I have borrowed every volume of Sandman. I miss the classics, especially all of the Ibsen and the multiple translations of Goethe's Faust. I miss the thoughtful thematic displays, changed monthly, from which I have selected many an excellent novel. I miss being able to say "I think I feel like re-reading a Madeline L'Engle series today" and finding that the RPL, bless its little heart, has the whole series at the same branch.

Yes, most of all I miss always being able to find the book I want to read. I'm not saying they have everything--that's impossible, and indeed there are a couple of specific novels I recall not finding there. But they're very few. It was never a question of "I wonder if the library has that" but rather "I wonder if that's at my branch right now, and if not how long will it take it to get there?" The Victoria library doesn't sort its paperbacks, and its collection of books is probably less than half the size of the RPL's. The Kochi library, being in Japan and therefore containing mostly books in Japanese, I really can't comment properly on. Sydney is worst. The library I am entitled to use here is a puny little three-branch suburb affair, which instead of having all of the books I want to read has none of them. The state library is reference-only, and to borrow from a bigger library elsewhere in the city I must pay fees.

I'm homesick for my library. I pine for it. My heart will not mend until I can once again breeze through its automatic doors, open generous hours including evenings and weekends. Can anyone loan me some L'Engle?