Booking Through Thursday: On Loan

Do you lend your books? Are any out on loan right now? Do you have any that have been loaned to you? Do you put a time limit on these? Do you think people should make an effort to read the loaned book quickly?

I very rarely do; in fact, I’m tempted to say that I used to and won’t anymore. My library is quite small and inaccessible, as it’s at my parents’ house at the moment, so that cuts down on lending anything from it out. If I want someone to read a particular book, I’ll usually try and find a copy at a thrift store for them.

I’ve just had really atrocious luck with lending my books out. In middle school or high school (it’s a blur, thank God!), I lent a friend of mine my treasured copy of Fire from Heaven by Mary Renault—I had a very poor grasp on what a library could do for me at the time and I had been so very proud I’d managed to get my parents to buy a book with queer content for me without them noticing. She returned it to me many weeks later than I expected, the book—gasp—damaged by being shoved into her backpack. I was utterly shocked. When my dad wanted to read Wicked, I cautiously lent him my copy. He didn’t damage it, but he never even opened the book—I had to steal it back out of my mom’s study a few months later for my trimonthly reading of the novel. (Oh, high school.) And my very first week of college, I lent my French textbook to a girl who promptly lost it in the rain.

So, yeah, I don’t really lend books or borrow them from other people—I prefer renting the library copies, because we all have agreed on the condition of library copies. In fact, I have a book out with a cracked spine that’s marked for repair as soon as I return it. But it’s a communal book, so I have no stake in its condition beyond “readable”. But otherwise? Lending doesn’t really work out for me at all.