It’s Time To Get A Library Card And Read Everything You Always Meant To Read

Are your eyeballs fried from staring at your TV? Or are you faced with the bookworm’s dilemma: you’ve already got shelves and shelves full, but nothing is quite hitting the spot? 

Even though you can’t visit the library in the real world right now, since all branches are shuttered in response to the coronavirus outbreak, you can still visit the stacks digitally. Don’t have a library card? No problem! 

New York residents can apply for a New York Public Library card through SimplyE (the NYPL’s free e-reader app) to access a nearly endless array of resources, including ebooks and audiobooks, as well as library databases, which include more than 800,000 digitized items, including historic prints, photographs, maps and manuscripts. 

An interactive database provides step-by-step lesson plans for 71 different languages. Wny not come out of quarantine speaking French or Arabic or Spanish? Here are instructions for downloading the app through Android and iOS.

Now is the time to become reacquainted with the kind of reader you are. Do you delve into our present to read some of the best books about epidemics (like “The Andromeda Strain,”  “The Stand” or Albert Camus’s existential “The Plague”), or do you opt for a little humor? Would you rather escape to another universe or become absorbed in a mystery thriller? Or try one of the classics you’ve always meant to read or one of the classics you never thought you’d finish (“Middlemarch,” “War & Peace,” “Moby-Dick”). 

Whatever kind of quarantined reader you are, it’s time to get started.