Going to the library means you pick what you want to read from a much wider variety of available books, not just the ones the adults in your life deemed worthy of purchase.
I would almost certainly be on a diet of some attractive but unchallenging fast food like teenage detective novels if I had that choice as a kid. Would my life actually have turned out better if I didn’t read the likes of Kafka, Dostoyevsky, Hesse, Garcia Marquez back then? Perhaps, but at the time I was enthralled and didn’t mind being able to choose among the books adults in my life had around (likely knowing I would end up reading some of them).
