David Cherry's blog

It would take a genuine, back-slapping-swimming-pool-blue-sportcoat-and-shiny-white-loafers-with-matching-belt-wearing used car salesman with 90 proof snake oil coursing through his double-thick Teflon-coated veins to convince most folks to read a blog on this particular subject—I'm talking some mutant mix of Tony Robbins, the late Billy Mays and LBJ in his arm-twisting-brow-beating-Uncle-Lyndie-with-a-lollipop-cooing prime.

This is a subject so fearsomely, so ostentatiously, dull that if your eyes are not by now rolling up into your head like slot machine tumblers you should think about a career as a statue. The very thought of documentaries about poets is so baroquely and perversely boring as to produce uncontrollable yawning in double espresso drinking Chihuahuas. I've nodded off twice already, and I (heaven help me) actually care about this stuff.

There are the big ones: your first kiss, your first car, your first paycheck; then there are the somewhat lesser firsts that somehow you remember just as well and almost as fondly. For a lot of Harris County Public Library’s customers, their first visit to a library is one of those. There’s something about a library that kids understand without much explaining. Children just naturally get the idea that books are made to be shared, and that life is full of possibilities, and that somehow those two notions are related.

We at Harris County Public Library think every day should be Take Your Child to the Library Day, but it’s alright with us if the folks up in Connecticut set aside, as they did, one day a year to remind everyone what a magical, life-enhancing place a library can be for a child, and that one of the best ways to give children a lifelong love of reading is for parents to read to them and to read for pleasure themselves, not to mention that a trip to the library is a no-cost, hassle-free chance for some quiet (or not so quiet) together-time.