write a paragraph on my favourite library
Answers
My favourite libraries
Libraries have always been among my favourite places. The very first library I visited was the West Scranton Branch of the Scranton Public Library. It was housed in a stately old house right across the street from my family’s church. It was there that I wrote my first paper, an essay on Benjamin Franklin. I submitted the paper to the annual Daughters of the American Revolution historical essay contest when I was ten or eleven years old. The paper made the first cut. Then I had to recite it from memory in front of the panel of DAR judges. I still cherish the medal I received for that paper and its recital. My ancestors did not travel over on the Mayflower.
My grandparents came over on four separate boats at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries, emigrants from Italy. Their children were determined that their sons and daughters would get the most out of the public education system, and where better to extend that education than in the local library. That library is long gone, replaced by apartment buildings and parking spaces. I outgrew it when I entered high school and began to visit the main library, Albright Memorial, in the centre of the city’s government and cultural district. The Gothic Revival building was where I spent many Saturday afternoons doing research for my English, History and Social Studies papers.
The second floor reading room is one of those spaces that occupies a corner of my memory as a cosy place to be. During the seven years I spent at Princeton University, first as an undergraduate and then as a graduate student studying architecture and urban planning, Firestone Library was where I spent the second most amount of time. First was the Architecture School, where all-nighters were common. The main reading room was a wonderful place to study. It is an expansive space, but being surrounded by other students who all appeared to be determined to make the Dean’s List for the first time, or stay on it, was an inspiration. When it came time to write my senior and Master’s Theses, there were individual study rooms that provided the kind of isolation needed for a concentrated effort.
