Wednesday, May 19, 2010

English Language Books at Pestalozzi Library

Ah books. Beautiful, wonderful books. Some women have shoe collections but not me, I have a book collection - in Texas. Of everything I left behind, my books were the hardest. My friends suggested a Kindle, but no, I like the smell and feel of paper and it is hard to curl up with a tablet. 

There are a couple of different library systems in Zurich and the Pestalozzi library is one of them. For 45 SFr per year, I can check out up to 25 books, DVDs, CDs or whatever at a time and they even have English language books. So I took the kids to the library hoping it would be a good find for my big girl who also obsesses over books (currently Magic Tree House) and first went in search of English language kids books. 

There were 50. I don't mean approximately 50, I mean 50. I counted them while S was looking at one of the books.  *sigh* She picked out one book and what I thought was a Globi DVD to help her learn Swiss German. Turns out it was a video game. Oh well. 

For the adult books, there was a larger selection of English books, about one and a half racks worth. All fiction and not very many new ones. I picked out Julie and Julia and The Birth House for myself, paid for my year membership and left. One perk of the Pestalozzi library - kids memberships are free until age 16. The kids membership limits borrowers to kids books only otherwise S would be checking out a lot of adult books. ;) 

Afterward, S was disappointed by the sparse selection so we stopped by the Brockenhaus behind Zurich HB that carries a limited supply of used books. The only book S found was a book on Babar going to America but it was in French. I bought it anyway and was able to translate it for her as I read it. I lucked out a little more and found a hardback copy of Stephen King's recent book Under the Dome

Tomorrow we are going back to the Pestalozzi library to return our books and get new ones. So excited!

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