English Books in Dutch Libraries

I love books that are non-fiction.

It is not that I do not like fiction, sometimes I do, but most of the books that I read in my life were non-fiction.

I used to spend many hours in our library looking for answers to questions I had, taking as much books home as I could.

But lately I hardly ever got to the library. One of the reasons is that most answers are so much faster to find online. But the other reason was that most of the books that I was interested in, got more and more specific.

 

No English books in our library

Living in the Netherlands means that our library has mainly Dutch books. But the books that I find online as a reference in my online searches are almost all in English.

So most of the time, I tried to find my information online (or sometimes buy a book) wishing that there where more books to borrow that I wanted to read.

Then a few weeks ago I read about a challenge. World’s Strongest Librarian Josh was planning to read one book for every number in the Dewey Decimal Classification System and I thought that was great.

Not that I could ever do that. I can only read something that I am really interested in, and if not, I have no idea what I am reading.

But I liked the challenge and thought I would have liked to join in with the books that had my interest. But because most of the books that have my main interest at the moment, are not translated, I thought it meant I just could not find them in our library.

Until I had a clear moment.

 

What about other libraries

In the past I had ordered books from other, larger, libraries in the Netherlands. And now I thought they might also have English books.

So I called our local library and found out there are online procedures for that. You start in one place, if the book is not there, you go to the next and if it is not there either, I could email one person who would look around if the book was anywhere available.

So I ordered 3 books and a few days later I already could pick them up. Brilliant!

 

A much to interesting book

And so I started with the first book: Science, Order and Creativity by David Bohm and David Peat.

But as excited that I am, having access to all those books all of a sudden, the next one is going to have to wait.

The reason for that is, that this first book is so really very interesting. The whole book already was, but the chapter ‘Creativity in the Whole of Life’ was so very interesting that I want to write a few blogposts about it.

There is a view about creativity that very much resonates with the way I see it. Not just important but even essential for our lives. So now I am going to read that chapter again…

Annemieke

English books in Dutch libraries

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