The Happy Place 5 is a monthly series where a few friends and I post 5 of our favorites books for a certain topic or theme. The name is from a Discord group that I am a part of. We created the space to have a positive environment for a handful of close friends. All of us are bookworms, and many of us are bookstagrammers and bloggers. So we decided to start a blog post series together! I’ll link my friends blogs and posts for this month’s topic at the end of this post.

Aaaaand just like that, it’s March. Which means! Yes, it’s time again for The Happy Place 5! This month we are talking about “Places you’d take a portal to in an instant.” To be honest, this one was kind of hard for me. Mostly because a lot of the settings in the books I read seem really cool but also really dangerous or scary lol. I tried to pick books where I’d be okay living there if there’s no portal back. Buuuuut really, I’m making this post assuming that I can portal back home if I want to hahaha.

Hey you know what are great? LIBRARIES. Books for free? Amazing. Spaces to read? Amazing. Media beyond just books, like DVDs and CDs and magazines? Amazing. LIBRARIES ARE AMAZING. And they have amazing people who work there to spread the love of books, so basically it’s a heaven on earth. I am so sorry for my copious use of the word “amazing”.

AAAAnyway, I’ve recently read a few books which heavily feature libraries in them and that got me thinking! How do libraries in literature compare to modern day/real life libraries? Okay, so we have the obvious point – a lot of what I read is fantasy, so clearly real life libraries don’t deal with anything magical. But what are the ideas behind literary libraries? The functions, the themes, etc. Do they match up with how we think of real life libraries? So I’m just gonna talk about a handful of books (that I happen to love) that feature libraries, and then discuss my thoughts a little bit!