Library blog.

The Schaumburg Township District Library, as it's known in full according to the large letters on the side of the large building, is a remarkable place. We went for a look on Sunday. A postmodern design, I suppose, with all sorts of art deco touches, this particular library was only finished in 1998 -- faith, I think, in the future of paper as a medium for writing. Blogs and e-mail notwithstanding, I'm a believer myself. I'm not going to gripe about the small fraction of my property taxes that goes to support this institution.

Size matters in a library. Books need space. For a suburban library, the Schaumburg Library is huge -- 146,000 sf, according to its Web site, making it one of the largest in Illinois. We had other errands to attend to that afternoon, and couldn't spend a lot of time there, but we did explore the three main lobes of the facility on the first floor: juvenile books and video; books for adult readers; and the video/CD/DVD/whatnot room. Lilly got herself a book and a tape, a Disney song collection. Yuriko got a tape, The King and I. An amusing musical.

King: ...Pairs of male elephants to be released into the forests of America. There it is hoped that they will grow in number and the people can tame them and use them as beasts of burden.
Anna: But your majesty, I don't think you mean pairs of male elephants.

These days I'm on a literary bender -- a Maugham bender -- so I went to Fiction and picked out Liza of Lambeth and Cakes and Ale, which will be the third and fourth books of his I'll read in a row. The former was his first published book, which came out in 1897. It's slim volume, and so far interesting enough. More like a long character study of the woman Liza, though of course in the end bad things will happen to her for loving a married man.