For twenty-six years, I worked a few minutes from the Topeka public library but I never got a library card there until March (2010). Once there however, I discovered a great number of resources that go beyond books: a wealth of books-on-tape, magazines, movies, and more. I am now visiting the library on a regular (approx. weekly) basis and recommend this to all who want to learn and grow and save money.

[note: article updated December 2014; for more on what I have learned on the topic of health, see our web site: healthsimply.org]

What got me there was my search for a few good books to buy and read on diet/nutrition. I wanted to spend my limited time and budget for books on the best I could find. So I first assembled a list of potential books by spending some time at Amazon’s web site. While Amazon has helpful information and recommendation of others, there are so many recommended books on this topic, I decided I needed to see them myself before buying.

So over that first lunch hour, I took my list of titles to the library. They had most of the titles on my list and many others besides. I looked them over, eliminated some from my list, added others, and checked out about half a doze books that first I wanted to look at in more detail.

In addition to books on diet and nutrition, I have been exploring other topics: finances and investing (The Random Walk Guider To Investing), leadership (Integrity: The Courage to Meet the Demands of Reality; Today Matters; Good to Great), exercise, time management, and more.

But once there, I found more than just books at the library:

• Books-on-tape , mostly CD’s.
• Magazines, some of which you can check out (helping me to decide which ones to subscribe to myself and which ones to look at there)
• Videos (DVD’s) of all kinds.

As my initial lunch hour at the library went quickly, I decided to go back the following week. I dropped off some of the books I was done with and found a couple more to check out to look and explored more of the resources above.

Books-on-tape – As a commuter (30 minutes a day each way), I was drawn to explore the library’s extensive set of books-on-tape. Actually, I may be benefiting more from this than the books themselves. At any one time, I will get 2-3 books-on-tape checked out. Some times, it only takes a short time to determine I am not interested. Frequently, I listen to a book-on-tape as a way to preview whether I want to read/purchase the book (I have seen moved on to listening to books via Audible, see my article on this).

I have listened to a variety of selections so far:

• 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea,
• an excellent, short summary of the life of Isaac Newton
• Good to Great, an engaging management book analyzing factors that separate good companies from great ones
• Highest Duty, an autobiography of the pilot who successfully landed his plane that lost book engines in the Hudson River
• Make Today Count: the secret of your success is determined by your daily agenda by John Maxwell.
• And more

The library’s magazine selection, some of which you can check out, has also been very helpful. I have decided to subscribe to three magazines (two on cooking; one on investing) as a result and decided to pass on a number of others, instead just looking at them at the library on a regular basis.

The Topeka Library is a very good. On-line you can reserve books and they will email you a note when it is ready to pick up.