Y’all.
I think my very Catholic upbringing requires I own up to things immediately, so the past few months I’ve been feeling VERY guilty not telling anyone that I finally got a library card. I’ve been buying books for my kindle and there are so many on there I haven’t read- and that shiz gets EXPENSIVE. I’ve never really considered book buying to be shopping but it definitely is and right now if it isn’t paint, primer, brushes or boxes, I’m trying not to buy it.
A few months ago a friend suggested a book to me. (Daughter of the God-King by Anne Cleeland. Amazing. Read it!) When I googled it instead of the top result being an amazon link it was a link to my local library using the SAILS platform. Ten minutes later I was reading the e-book.
Since then I’ve checked out a book a week, downloaded straight to my Kindle.
My last Massachusetts library card was from Tufts Library in Weymouth, MA. I got it in 1983, used it to read every single Nancy Drew book, and by now I must owe them thousands for the three books on the Red Scare and McCarthyism I lost in 1996. When the kids were tiny we would go to that same library often but I was always sure they would run whatever version of a Library Credit Check they had and would shame me publicly or fine me more than I could afford. (yay anxiety) We would go for story time, and to play on their amazing playground, and to read books there, but we never checked any out.
When we moved to Austin, TX I felt confident getting a library card. Certainly my debts wouldn’t follow me there, 20 years later. Certainly the long arm of the Weymouth Library didn’t extend that far. I think I owe Austin Public Library 3.00 for the late return of a Pendergast novel, clearly I am a repeat offender in the Library crime world.
I was hesitant to get another library card, to possibly restart my life of check-out-crime after 8 years on the lam, but the allure of free Regency romance novels was too great. I am a card carrying reader again. E-Books are a safe way to go, after a week they just take them back off of my device, I couldn’t forget to return them even if I tried.
There we are. I’ve confessed my library sins. I feel better.
Better late than never.
xoxo
Shop My Feelings 
What I found is that if I never closed the book on my kindle then it wouldn’t disappear at the due date. So if you aren’t finished reading it you could finish it as long as you just kept it open and never went back to the menu or opened another book.
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Excellent tip!! Being a wanton overdue-book recidivist just waiting to reoffend, I learned that if you put the kindle in airplane mode the book goes nowhere. The system has taken it out of your account so it doesn’t show as overdue and it becomes available to the next reader waiting for it.
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