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A review by becca_g_powell
The Library Book by Rebecca Gray
3.0
This is a nice little book, worth reading a little bit at a time. I don't recommend reading it all the way through in one sitting (although it's short enough to do so).
The reason is that for 80% of the entries, it appears that each author was given a very specific prompt (something like "how did public libraries affect your life") and a word limit (each piece seemed a unnaturally a bit foreshortened). As a result, most of them are *very* similar in structure and content (Writer was working class or very poor as a child, luckily there was a public library nearby, child discovered it and read voraciously, child lists a bunch of authors they liked a lot, child grows up to be a writer, finished up with 1-3 paragraphs about why politicians who want to close libraries should be ashamed of themselves). If you read them all in a row, it gets tiresome.
I really liked Caitlin Moran's and Stephen Fry's versions of that idea, and I really disliked Alan Bennett's, which pretty much read like a poorly disguised back-door-brag about how genius and awesome and Literary he always was. A couple times there were actual short stories that just had libraries more subtly in the background, which were really my favorite and broke up the monotony of the "I love libraries, they are important" articles.
The reason is that for 80% of the entries, it appears that each author was given a very specific prompt (something like "how did public libraries affect your life") and a word limit (each piece seemed a unnaturally a bit foreshortened). As a result, most of them are *very* similar in structure and content (Writer was working class or very poor as a child, luckily there was a public library nearby, child discovered it and read voraciously, child lists a bunch of authors they liked a lot, child grows up to be a writer, finished up with 1-3 paragraphs about why politicians who want to close libraries should be ashamed of themselves). If you read them all in a row, it gets tiresome.
I really liked Caitlin Moran's and Stephen Fry's versions of that idea, and I really disliked Alan Bennett's, which pretty much read like a poorly disguised back-door-brag about how genius and awesome and Literary he always was. A couple times there were actual short stories that just had libraries more subtly in the background, which were really my favorite and broke up the monotony of the "I love libraries, they are important" articles.