Does your library have an amnesty period? I know some will have a time when you can return any book and not have to pay fines. I kind of gave up on the local library because I'd bring books back but the staff never checked them in and I'd get nailed with fines; I resorted to either taking out the card showing the due date and saying that gee, it must have fallen out or, on occasion, pulling the book off the shelf and waving it under their noses.

how do you (or can you even) recommend something that includes things which were unremarkable at the time but which would never fly now?

In my book group, I suggested Georgette Heyer's The Grand Sophy by saying something along the lines of, "This book is a good example of an author whose work was seminal in developing the Regency romance genre. However, she was writing in the first half of the 20th century, and her antisemitism is blatant. Given that, would you be interested in putting it on our reading schedule?"

We ended up reading it. And we had a good conversation about it, including tearing apart the racist, antisemitic tropes.

I will share that sometimes it has been a really long time at the library and they have changed computer systems, and they don’t remember your fines... Not saying that has happened....

I also now only get e-books and online audio books from the library, because then they just disappear and no fines.

Yes I only do ebooks because they disappear, no fines!

Potentially they might also have those shows on Hoopla or Kanopy through the library?

And the movie I wish I could wholeheartedly recommend is Drop Dead Gorgeous. But even the last time I watched it a few years ago, the intellectually challenged brother in overalls bit is egregiously bad, even if it’s a very small part of the movie.

Like Breakfast at Tiffany's. The Mickey Rooney part is so horrible that it's hard to divorce the rest of the movie from it.

(Brain wanted to type Mickey Rourke. Wrong Mickey, brain.)

I'm reminded of the icebreaker I was doing at work recently where they asked what decade you would want to live in, and I was in all all-women groups, and we all said the future, still! All of the past is garbage! (Of the US, at least -- one person did make a decent case for some point in ancient Egypt.)

Exactly, Dana!!

And yes, Jesse—maybe there are great eras of other cultures that I would enjoy but western culture of the past couple Millenium? Heck no. Plus I want indoor plumbing.

and antibiotics! The two things I always demand when jumping to another time. I've tent camped a lot. I can deal with inconveniences. But flush toilets and antibiotics are a must.

A friend moved to England and got married and lived in a big house (bought on sale for the taxes) with a nationally registered rose garden which she and her DH maintained themselves. She bought a horse and took up point-to-point for a while, then got intrigued with bell ringing and became competent at it and eventually signed up to be called for any of about four or five churches when they needed bellringers. And sold the horse. All very intriguing.

Except the bell towers were all affiliated with, you know, *churches*, and before you know it she was doing regular Tuesday evenings as a "Street Pastor," I.E. accosting people on the sidewalk to talk about Jesus, and at that point she and I more or less drifted apart. But, you know, bell-ringer adjacent for a while, that was pretty neat.

My office was part of the library for a while, and I’d walk by the new releases shelves twice a day, minimum. Very dangerous for my TBR pile. Plus, as university staff we can keep books through the end of the school year, even if we check them out in July. And with COVID, they suspended all due dates to keep people from coming to the library for anything minor, so I’ve had some books out for a year and a half now. If someone else asks for the book we do have to get it back within a week or pay a hefty fine, but that’s fair. They probably need it for a paper or something, and I just have it because it caught my eye.

I had a friend in high school who talked nostalgically about living in past eras. I pointed out that a) without modern antibiotics I wouldn’t have lived past four years and b) we had about 95% odds of being a peasant or slave in any of the time periods she mentioned, which did not sound great. But if I had to live in the past, Crete before the volcano turned Thera into Santorini could be interesting.

There's a section in Lois McMaster Bujold's ... Komarr, I think it is ... where Ekaterin is talking to her aunt, a history professor, who comments that young girls often romanticize the past. And she points out that they'd be doing "women's work" such as weaving until they went blind or dying from dysentery or childbirth at a young age, which she doesn't find romantic at all.