Last night, I attended a local Board of Trustees meeting in our village. The meeting discussed an issue that was raising some heat among the town’s residents. Many of the villagers stepped forward to address the Board. Some received thunderous ovations after they spoke, but others were not treated as kindly.

The issue at hand was tangentially related to tax rates, which led one resident to say (and I paraphrase) “I understand why I have to pay taxes for the schools, even though I don’t have school-age children. But why do I have to pay taxes for a library? It’s 2025, who needs a library?”

My heart sank.

I am sure I can remember every public library I have ever spent time in. I started visiting the Chicago Public Library Branch on Clark Street in Rogers Park as a toddler My mother firmly clenched my hand as she browsed the shelves, looking for a summer read. Soon I was allowed to explore the library on my own—followed by journeys downtown to hunt and peck at the children’s section of the Michigan Avenue Central Library.

I fondly recall my first library card, and the bright strips of paper inserted into each book at checkout. I also recall how my reading tastes changed from Dr. Suess stories to Encyclopedia Brown mysteries, to enjoying the Grand Dame of Mystery, Agatha Christie. It was in a library book that I found out who murdered Roger Ackroyd.

As I grew older, my love for libraries only deepened and as a suburbanite, I always took advantage of nearby libraries. I quickly learned where the new fiction was kept, how to find the best mysteries, and where I could find interesting magazines to kill a few minutes while waiting for someone. I even won a trivia/book treasure hunt contest at one municipal branch. That was years before my Jeopardy! debut.

I discovered so many authors at my library: John Le Carre and his British agents, Daniel Silva and his Israeli team, and Lee Child and his American loner. For a taste of something different, there was thought-provoking or historical non-fiction.

When Barb convinced me that my long daily commute was a perfect time to listen to audiobooks, I prowled until I found my library’s Books-on-CD section. John Steinbeck’s East of Eden was the first novel I listened to, and it remains one of my favorites. Ernest Hemingway, Philip Roth, and even Harlan Coben went from the library’s CD rack to the player in my car. And when cars no longer came equipped with a CD player, the library had provisions for downloading to my phone. From there via Bluetooth I could convey the latest Dana French novel to my SUV’s speakers.

Libraries are wonderful, magical, places. So to the woman who spoke at the Board meeting, I need to say that maybe, maybe, no one NEEDS a library. But what a world of pleasure they can provide!

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