By: Rochelle Logan, Associate Director of Support Services, Douglas County Libraries

Books are powerful things. Or rather, the ideas in them sometimes find surprising resonance in the world.

Here are four examples;

"Common Sense," by Thomas Paine. The American Revolution was by no means a certain thing. Paine's plain-spoken case for independence, predicated on the then radical notion of individual liberties, took the nascent nation by storm. It may well have precipitated the war. It certainly persuaded people that what they might fight for was both noble and
necessary.

Here's the good news. Twice now, the library has done inventories, and found in the process that our theft rate is remarkably low. That has saved us the cost of expensive security systems -- the sort with gates, magnetic strips, and the like. Overwhelmingly, the people who use our libraries are decent and law-abiding.

Kurt Vonnegut, the sly and pungent science fiction writer who gave us "Cat's Cradle," "The Sirens of Titan," and many others, once described something called a "karass." A "karass" is a group of people who keep showing up in your life, whose days are repeatedly entangled with yours to accomplish some purpose.