Karin Slaughter: Libraries saved me, now they need rescuing

Books provide access to a better way of life, and for many, libraries are the only way they can get to them. That is why I am campaigning to save them and you should, too

My father and his eight siblings grew up in the kind of poverty that Americans don’t like to talk about unless a natural disaster like Hurricane Katrina strikes, and then the conversation only lasts as long as the news cycle. His family squatted in shacks. The children scavenged for food. They put cardboard over empty windowpanes so the cold wouldn’t kill them.

Books did not exist here. When you grow up starving, you cannot point with pride to a book you’ve just spent six hours reading. Picking cotton, sewing flour bags into clothes — those were the skills my father grew up appreciating.

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