Last weekend, Little Free Library celebrated its tenth anniversary. LFL marked the occasion with The Big Share, encouraging book lovers to share books in libraries near them. Sugar and I dropped a few books in libraries in our neighborhood, and the hardest part was, of course, letting go of a few in the collection.

I was a bookworm from the start. As a toddler, I would marvel watching the faces of my mother, grandmother, or pictured at left, great-grandmother, read aloud; it seemed pure magic that they could turn gibberish on a page into stories from their mouths. After my mom taught me to read, reading alongside a grown-up was one of my favorite things. (Need I even mention that I was an only child? Seems so obvious now, doesn’t it?)

My grandmother Gagie - that was my baby talk mash-up of “Granny” and “Peggy” - sent me two books for my first day of kindergarten. Monroe’s New First Reader isn’t dated; its accompanying volume, Robinson’s First Book in Arithmetic, was published in 1874. Her inscription: “Here’s hoping you love to read as much as I do.” Her wish came true, and I inherited her love of antiques to boot.

I anxiously awaited each month’s new release in The Baby-sitter’s Club collection as an elementary schooler. I’d drag my mom into Waldenbooks in the mall and convince her that I absolutely needed the latest one. At girl scout camp one summer, my tent mate told me that her parents paid her to read, a penny a page. I brought that idea back to my parents, and they laughed at me.

Something happened around middle school. The teasing over my bookwormishness got old, and the pubescent self-consciousness of being different pushed the books away for a while. A few popular novels found their way to me through my high school and early college years. John Grisham was really a thing at the time, and reading his books usually gave you something to talk about with people you didn’t know well, which my introverted nature always made a struggle.

As I moved into a business major and the English classes fell from my course schedule, I started to miss books. I was eager to read them for pleasure again, not for dissection in a class discussion. And so I eased back into being a bookworm. I did most of my studying in a bookstore. My college girlfriends and I exchanged novels for the train rides across Europe the summer after we graduated. Long distance book clubs became a way to stay in touch.

Thanks to a blossomed book-loving identity and a pinch-hitting gig at my friend’s bookstore, Country Bookshelf, I have stacks of books. Some I’ve read; most I haven’t - this happens when you pass along the good ones. Scrounging up a few for The Big Share proved challenging.

A half-hour staring at the shelves yielded a half-dozen to give away. LFL has a directory on their website, from which I created my route. Sugar and I walked around town, seeking streets we hadn’t been down before. On our path to my friend Jessica’s LFL, I stumbled upon two more. I felt sneaky walking into other’s lawns and reaching into their libraries with only generalized permission. I fought an urge to run away, as if I had left a bag of Sugar’s best output instead of a delightful new read.

I hope I get to learn who grabbed my mom’s copy of Pachinko. I hope someone lovely got the book that I borrowed from a horrible boss and never gave back; that one needs some good new juju. I hope that books I loaned out and never got back found their ways to Little Free Libraries somewhere.

I’d love to hear your Little Free Library stories. Drop me a line at kate@sugarandkiki.com. Happy reading!