Let's give them a big hand …

… In Praise of the Small Town Library | Literary Hub. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

This part of Pennsylvania, though mountainous and cut off, lacked the widespread tradition of reading to fill the quiet hours that you find throughout rural New England or the upper prairie states. “Nose always in a book,” some hardworking adult you knew would remark, not disapprovingly, but not exactly enthusiastically, either. Serious readers existed, of course; but as islands, unaware of one another. A few years ago, my childhood friend Mayers’s father died, and I was invited to the house and given some of his books. In an upstairs room, I found novels by Iris Murdoch and Peter Matthiessen and TheCollected Poems of Dylan Thomas, which surprised me, and I thought, regretfully, of how Gene Mayers and I only ever talked about the Phillies.