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3.99 AVERAGE
3.99 AVERAGE
This was a fun listen, especially as a librarian. I will forever have Orlean's analogy of a library preparing for opening as an opera or musical about to go on and take center stage. That part literally gave me chills. I also thoroughly enjoyed every chapter beginning with a few titles and their Dewey, it was a very nice touch. I think the story itself is enrapturing because it is still a mystery as to who or what started the fire at the Los Angeles Central Library in 1986. I even asked my mom if she remembered any mention in the local papers about it and she couldn't recall, but like Orlean states it did get overshadowed by Chernobyl. I would recommend this book to library lovers, people that like reading true crime and mysteries, and non-fiction lovers.
This book is great if you love libraries, library books, librarians, the city of Los Angeles, true crime (arson in particular), dry wit, and/or solid writing.
All readers should go get a copy of this book. It is a masterpiece of crime fiction and a love letter to books and libraries.
Susan Orlean writes so beautifully that I could get into any topic she cares to treat with a book. When I saw she was writing about libraries, I had high expectations. "The Library Book" managed to live up to all of them. It's part mystery (what caused a huge fire at the Los Angeles public library in April 1986?), part history (of Los Angeles as well as its library) and part romance (between Orlean and books, between all of us and libraries). Despite a huge cast of characters and 150-plus years of historical detail, the book never drags.
Please note: "The Library Book" comes out this fall. I read an advance copy of this book via NetGalley.
Please note: "The Library Book" comes out this fall. I read an advance copy of this book via NetGalley.
I wish the true crime mystery was more resolved (but that's life.) Plenty of history about libraries to keep a book lover happy.
Susan Orlean has long been a favorite author of mine through her pieces in The New Yorker and Rolling Stone from The Shaggs article to the one on the girl surfers. I also remember the piece about the basketball player (just checked her site: it's called "Shoot The Moon").
"The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup" was the first full-length book of hers that I read, shared and talked about obsessively, as it allowed me to go back to some of my favorite pieces again and again. I finally lent it out to a person less concerned about returning books than I thought, and as a result of my bad read, it is now gone from my library. But I still think about it.
Why all of this may help readers to pick up something called "The Library Book" is that Orlean is once again sharing a much wider world than the title infers. She has an investigative reporter's eye and ear for detail, but a gentle hand for the people involved, and is determined to dot the litany of fascinating facts about her subject with poignant and unobtrusive characterizations of and her exchanges with the people involved.
Yes, this book is about libraries, but its also about people who use these public spaces and how the modern version of a library was created and how it remains deeply problematic and yet also deeply aspirational. The Los Angeles Central Library is the setting for this book, but it could also have been set in hundred different libraries. I think of the drama of my New Orleans libraries after the 2005 levee breaks and how the librarians I knew (and I realized then that I knew many for some odd reason, odd because it was mostly not through their jobs) had struggled with other issues unfamiliar to many of us rebuilding: the loss of almost all of their workplaces and their contents, but also the missing interactions with patrons and their role as a daily participant in the human parade where they were a bringer of comfort and stability. I think Orlean has captured my friends experience even though she writes about a fire in one building in a very different city. I am also sure that the hospital and school workers of New Orleans circa 2005 can also see themselves in her descriptions of the turmoil the LA librarians dealt with personally and professionally after the fire.
In short, you simply cannot read a piece of Orlean's writing without seeing the person she is interviewing or the person(s) that the piece is about in full color (and rips and tears) and then not think about lots of other people that remind you of that person. People think they are hidden from the world, but a writer like Orlean shows they are seen, and that there was at least an attempt to understand their time, their story, their contribution. The Library Book ends with Orlean realizing what makes libraries special to her, but the passage also is what makes her writing special to us:
"All of the things that are wrong in the world seem conquered by a library's simple unspoken promise; Here I am, please tell me your story; her is my story, please listen."
"The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup" was the first full-length book of hers that I read, shared and talked about obsessively, as it allowed me to go back to some of my favorite pieces again and again. I finally lent it out to a person less concerned about returning books than I thought, and as a result of my bad read, it is now gone from my library. But I still think about it.
Why all of this may help readers to pick up something called "The Library Book" is that Orlean is once again sharing a much wider world than the title infers. She has an investigative reporter's eye and ear for detail, but a gentle hand for the people involved, and is determined to dot the litany of fascinating facts about her subject with poignant and unobtrusive characterizations of and her exchanges with the people involved.
Yes, this book is about libraries, but its also about people who use these public spaces and how the modern version of a library was created and how it remains deeply problematic and yet also deeply aspirational. The Los Angeles Central Library is the setting for this book, but it could also have been set in hundred different libraries. I think of the drama of my New Orleans libraries after the 2005 levee breaks and how the librarians I knew (and I realized then that I knew many for some odd reason, odd because it was mostly not through their jobs) had struggled with other issues unfamiliar to many of us rebuilding: the loss of almost all of their workplaces and their contents, but also the missing interactions with patrons and their role as a daily participant in the human parade where they were a bringer of comfort and stability. I think Orlean has captured my friends experience even though she writes about a fire in one building in a very different city. I am also sure that the hospital and school workers of New Orleans circa 2005 can also see themselves in her descriptions of the turmoil the LA librarians dealt with personally and professionally after the fire.
In short, you simply cannot read a piece of Orlean's writing without seeing the person she is interviewing or the person(s) that the piece is about in full color (and rips and tears) and then not think about lots of other people that remind you of that person. People think they are hidden from the world, but a writer like Orlean shows they are seen, and that there was at least an attempt to understand their time, their story, their contribution. The Library Book ends with Orlean realizing what makes libraries special to her, but the passage also is what makes her writing special to us:
"All of the things that are wrong in the world seem conquered by a library's simple unspoken promise; Here I am, please tell me your story; her is my story, please listen."
This was a wandering book with loose story ties to the largest library fire in America. As a lover of books and libraries, this was an interesting read with many, many random tidbits of history.
How did the library profession get so lucky to have Susan Orlean delve, discover and illuminate the world I love so much in her inimitable way? Slayed me.
My Personal Notes on this book
If you are not hooked on the public libraries of your life, this book will be a hard slog. I also suggest the audiobook as the author's voice conveys many subtle shades of drollery that I can imagine being lost in the print edition.
It's a book that starts out being about the 1986 fire that wiped out most of the Central branch of the LA Public Library, follows the histories of the library, the directors of the libraries, arson, Los Angeles, the Board, the principle arson suspect, fire departments, and the way that the library became a forerunner of what libraries have become in the USA: community centers, hubs of information exchange, sites of the most random combinations of citizens bumping into each other and interacting.
So the thing is, I *love* the take that Orleans tends to have on her subjects. It always reminds me what I love about being a citizen of the USA which is to say really visiting the fact of its cognitive dissonance, its zany paradoxes, the weirdos, the humorous, grotesque, gentle, dependable, obscene, show stopping and tragic nutburgerdom of our nation. I keep thinking about how I tried to sell my friends from overseas on Winter Bone, the movie, but they patently didn't believe that the movie could be about real people, the crime families of Arkansas. I kind of think I have to send those friends to the books of Susan Orlean.
Literally the fact that you can *not* eat in a USA library but you *can* eat in a, say, German library...well, that just adds to all the ways our culture sets our collective psyche up to be public and simultaneously private, and really foiled by the difference between these two halves of our very own selves. The amount of patroling to guard the books and common spaces tells us...so much about what this culture values and does not.
Anyway, Orlean visited my grad school back in the 90s and I didn't really think "ooo an important great writer" but "oooo a writer that I can relate to and who is doing well." I promptly started to teach her "American Man, Age Ten" every single time I taught Intro to Creative Writing (which at this point is maybe 20 times or so) and asked students in my class to reverse engineer the directions for "how to write a profile" from the profile. I LOVE that she told GQ, no thanks, I don't want to write about the child star of Home Alone, I want to write about...an average ten year old boy. And therein, Orlean's irresistible mix of letting facts AND choice quotations speak for themselves--creating along the way the most delicious deadpan irony--I mean it is irresistible to me like potato chips.
I did skip over some of the history that came after the chapters about Lummis. But none of it was irrelevant, I just had gotten used to the varying formats and texture of the chapters and this seemed to be a long series of historic profiles on library directors. No big deal.
If you are not hooked on the public libraries of your life, this book will be a hard slog. I also suggest the audiobook as the author's voice conveys many subtle shades of drollery that I can imagine being lost in the print edition.
It's a book that starts out being about the 1986 fire that wiped out most of the Central branch of the LA Public Library, follows the histories of the library, the directors of the libraries, arson, Los Angeles, the Board, the principle arson suspect, fire departments, and the way that the library became a forerunner of what libraries have become in the USA: community centers, hubs of information exchange, sites of the most random combinations of citizens bumping into each other and interacting.
So the thing is, I *love* the take that Orleans tends to have on her subjects. It always reminds me what I love about being a citizen of the USA which is to say really visiting the fact of its cognitive dissonance, its zany paradoxes, the weirdos, the humorous, grotesque, gentle, dependable, obscene, show stopping and tragic nutburgerdom of our nation. I keep thinking about how I tried to sell my friends from overseas on Winter Bone, the movie, but they patently didn't believe that the movie could be about real people, the crime families of Arkansas. I kind of think I have to send those friends to the books of Susan Orlean.
Literally the fact that you can *not* eat in a USA library but you *can* eat in a, say, German library...well, that just adds to all the ways our culture sets our collective psyche up to be public and simultaneously private, and really foiled by the difference between these two halves of our very own selves. The amount of patroling to guard the books and common spaces tells us...so much about what this culture values and does not.
Anyway, Orlean visited my grad school back in the 90s and I didn't really think "ooo an important great writer" but "oooo a writer that I can relate to and who is doing well." I promptly started to teach her "American Man, Age Ten" every single time I taught Intro to Creative Writing (which at this point is maybe 20 times or so) and asked students in my class to reverse engineer the directions for "how to write a profile" from the profile. I LOVE that she told GQ, no thanks, I don't want to write about the child star of Home Alone, I want to write about...an average ten year old boy. And therein, Orlean's irresistible mix of letting facts AND choice quotations speak for themselves--creating along the way the most delicious deadpan irony--I mean it is irresistible to me like potato chips.
I did skip over some of the history that came after the chapters about Lummis. But none of it was irrelevant, I just had gotten used to the varying formats and texture of the chapters and this seemed to be a long series of historic profiles on library directors. No big deal.
Very interesting book not only about the LA Central library fire (and possible arsonist) but about libraries in general and the impact they have on all of us. Well written, well researched; like the author I am torn about whether the suspect in the arson fire really did the deed or not.