by Anjali JosephI don’t like working in libraries, and so I leave it as a last resort. Perhaps that’s why I don’t like working in libraries. For one thing it involves concentration in a quantity that I find slightly painful. For another, there’s the febrile atmosphere. It’s very plain, in any given reading room or library, that there are two sorts of people: those who are gossiping with their friends/canoodling with their partners, and those who are doing Much More Work Than You. The latter are virtually grunting with effort, as they fill pages of notes, motor through journal articles, or frown over large tomes. They seem to be a bigger, slightly more grown-up version of the people who always sprang up like unsavoury fungi around me in exam halls at university. Like the first paper of my third-year finals (Tragedy, rather appositely), in which I spent almost the first two of three hours staring about me in a strange, out-of-body experience of despair. Within a few minutes, it seemed, of the invigilator announcing that our time had begun, the girl in front was straining her arm into the air, demanding more paper, and those special green tie things.
