Hey everyone. I work at a very rural public library, we’re very welcoming and accommodating of all peoples, but we do have a pretty large monoculture of elderly white people and a fair amount of white children too.
Today a Hispanic woman came in and asked if we had any books in Spanish, any at all. She spoke fair English, but can’t read it well. She held her phone translator app up to me and it said “I don’t care what the book is about, I just want to read”. She was so kind, and it made me incredibly sad and embarrassed that our library has ZERO Spanish language books outside of things like “learn Spanish for dummies”, etc.
I spoke with our director and we want to fix this. Even though we don’t have many Hispanic people coming in, we want to make it better for the ones who do.
So my question is, what are some great novels we could get for our collection that would do justice for our patron today? Or any others in the future? Thank you all for reading this.
by mwellscubed