I still remember the moment I found the first Harry Potter book. It was in the library of my elementary school. The library was small, but it had a wide window along one wall, allowing plenty of sunlight to penetrate. If I remember correctly, the first Harry Potter book that had just come out was introduced as one of the recommended books for elementary school students, in a corner of the library right by the entrance. That’s where I saw the book for the first time.

Harry Potter captivated me right away from the first page until I had to put the book down for whatever reason. Whenever I opened the book again, it sucked me right back into the story and the magical world. But the library itself always set the right tone and atmosphere for me to travel into another world.

Like so many others, I have always loved being in libraries: the unadulterated smell of old paper, the air so still that time seems to stop, and the quiet, empty space that lets people explore the worlds within books instead of the physical reality around them.

There are a few libraries from my childhood and youth that I still remember. Perhaps because I visited them much more often when I was little. I consumed books more hungrily than I did food. When I was about five, my mom got me a collection of children’s books filled with short stories about animals, bugs, and all sorts of other creatures. I loved them so much that I felt nervous at the thought of finishing them all. New books and stories thrilled me. When my whole family went out for dinner, I insisted on staying home alone so that I could keep reading those books.

My mom also bought me a collection of biographies. I read the biographies of Helen Keller and Walt Disney over and over again. Their stories gave me hope that I could do anything I dreamed of, no matter how challenging and hopeless it seemed. At that age, I did not yet understand that achieving things I wanted might be difficult at all.

I fell in love with the Moomin books when I was nine. I was living in Seoul with my grandparents, my mom, and my sister. My school library didn’t have the Moomin books, so I went to a different library run by the city. It was much darker and quieter, and I do not remember seeing other people there. Most of the time, it was just me in the library, sometimes accompanied by my best friend or my sister. The books’ exotic characters, names, and places kept drawing me back to the library. How different the stories about this peculiar Finnish troll family were from my own small world. I felt Snufkin’s loneliness and bohemian spirit, Little My’s unapologetic freedom to be herself, and the delicious terror of reading Sniff’s story on a rainy night.

I also loved Le petit Nicolas, the famous children’s book series from France. I was shocked by how often French parents seemed to slap their children. I was as little as Nicolas, but I found it hilarious how he and his friends obliviously drove the adults around them mad. Jean-Jacques Sempé remains one of my heroes, and he always will.

Without my realizing it, these books and libraries affected and shaped the little me. I still love libraries, and there are great libraries in the States, but for some reason, I rarely visit them anymore. I also read far fewer books than I did as a child.

When I was young, reading was simply something fun to do. There were not many places where I could go and hang out. Also, I read purely for pleasure, for my enjoyment. Nowadays, I read to study or learn something, and I go to libraries only when I need to work.

Perhaps reading out of necessity narrows the experience. It leaves us less room to wander, explore, and stumble into new worlds. We grow reluctant to read purely for pleasure because time is finite. Books certainly still entertain us, of course, but now there are so many other exciting things in the world competing for our attention.

And yet, it feels even more important to find joy in reading. Conjuring a world in your mind, watching visuals of a new world come alive from texts, and traveling in it strengthen our ability to imagine. Imagination is the first step of creation.

One day, I want to have my own library, filled with paper and wood, with a large window letting in the light. There, I will travel to unknown places.