The Kemijoki is the longest river in Finland. It rises in the fells of eastern Lapland, near the Russian border, and runs five hundred and fifty kilometers southwest to the Gulf of Bothnia. Along its middle reaches, between the towns of Rovaniemi and Pello, there are nine villages too small to have their own library.

Since 2017, those villages have shared one. It floats.

The Kirjavene, which translates roughly as the book boat, is a twelve-meter retrofitted river ferry painted white with a green stripe at the waterline. It carries about seven thousand books, a small reading room with three chairs and a low table, and one librarian.

Aino Saari has been the librarian on the Kirjavene for four years. She is forty-six. Before this she worked at the main library in Rovaniemi. She applied for the boat job, she said, because she was tired of the city and because her grandmother had lived in one of the nine villages.

"In Vikajarvi," she said. "My grandmother taught school there for thirty-one years. When she died, I read her diaries. They were full of the names of children. I wanted to know the children's grandchildren."

The Kirjavene operates from late April, when the ice goes out, until late October, when it returns. In summer it runs a weekly circuit, leaving the dock at Rovaniemi on Monday mornings and returning on Friday afternoons.

The villages, in order, are: Vikajarvi, Olkkajarvi, Vanttauskoski, Pirttikoski, Juotasniemi, Tervola-Sahankyla, Loue, Petajaskoski, and Valajaskoski. The boat stops at each for between one and three hours.

I joined the Kirjavene on a Tuesday in May, at the dock in Vanttauskoski. The dock is wooden. There is a small wooden shelter for waiting passengers, which on that morning held two children, a woman with a folding shopping cart, and an old man with a Thermos.

Aino arrived at nine-fifteen. She tied up the boat, set out a wooden ramp, and opened the door.

“She tied up the boat, set out a wooden ramp, and opened the door.”

The interior of the Kirjavene is warmer than the outside. The shelves are birch. The books are arranged by subject: fiction, history, children's, cooking, fishing, religion, and a small section labeled "Lapland," which holds books about reindeer husbandry, Sami culture, and the war.

The children went straight to the children's shelves. The woman with the cart asked Aino for a specific cookbook, which Aino retrieved from a back room. The old man with the Thermos sat in one of the three chairs and began to read a newspaper from three days earlier.

"He always reads the old newspaper," Aino said quietly. "He says it has had time to settle."

Aino knows every regular reader by name. She keeps no formal list. She remembers what they like.

For the woman with the cart, who is named Marja and is sixty-eight, Aino had set aside two novels. "Marja reads three a week," she said. "In winter, four."

For the children, a brother and sister named Elias and Vilma, ages eight and six, she had a stack of picture books and one chapter book about a wolf.

The chapter book, Aino explained, was a test. Elias had been reading picture books for too long. His mother had asked Aino, quietly, to push him.

"He will say no at first," Aino said. "Then he will take it. He always takes it."

Elias took it.

The Kirjavene's collection rotates. Aino swaps about four hundred books a month with the main library in Rovaniemi. Requests come in by phone, by email, and sometimes by note left on the dock.

On the dashboard of the boat she keeps a notebook. The most recent entries, in her small careful handwriting: "Petajaskoski - 2 books on bee-keeping, for Heikki." "Loue - the new Tommi Kinnunen, three copies if possible." "Valajaskoski - someone has asked for a book about owls. I do not know who. Ask next week."

The boat is funded by the municipal libraries of Rovaniemi and Tervola and by a small annual grant from the Finnish Ministry of Education. Its total operating budget is about eighty thousand euros a year.

"It is not much," Aino said. "It is enough."

She left Vanttauskoski at eleven. Marja waved from the dock. Elias and Vilma waved from inside the shelter, where their mother had come to collect them. The old man with the Thermos had taken his newspaper and his Thermos and walked back up the dirt road toward the village.

The next stop was Pirttikoski, an hour downriver. The river was high with spring melt and the color of weak tea. Birches lined both banks, their new leaves still pale.

Aino steered from the small wheelhouse at the front. She had a thermos of coffee and a sandwich her husband had made. On the radio, low, was a program about classical music.

"This is the part I like," she said. "Between the villages."