The Library Book by Susan Orlean investigates the cause of the devastating fire that burned the Los Angeles Public Library in 1986. Then it steps back and looks at the history of the LA Library, alongside the history of LA itself — from frontier town to Hollywood. Broadening the scope even more, Orlean considers the history of library destruction around the world. In researching the book she even visited various library departments and shadowed librarians of all levels in their daily work. The chapters of The Library Book weave in and out of these story lines, highlighting surprising and often funny details in the lives of past head librarians, the architect of the LA Public Library, and the possible arsonist.
I read this book in two days, which is rare for me (I admit that I was starting to panic that my monthly reading numbers were slipping, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a great read!). If you’re at all intrigued by the premise and the quotations I’m about to share, check this book out (I suggest you literally check it out from a library… but you can always buy a copy if you prefer).
“Our visits to the library were never long enough for me. The place was so beautiful. I loved wandering around the bookshelves, scanning the spines until something happened to catch my eye. Those visits were dreamy, frictionless interludes that promised I would leave richer than I arrived. It wasn’t like going to a store with my mom, which guaranteed a tug-of-war between what I wanted and what my mother was willing to buy me; in the library I could have anything I wanted. After we checked out, I loved being in the car and having all the books we’d gotten tacked on my lap, pressing me under their solid, warm weight, their Mylar covers sticking a bit to my thighs. It was such a thrill leaving a place with things you hadn’t paid for; such a thrill anticipating the new books we would read.”
“Taking books away from a culture is to take away its shared memory. It’s like taking away the ability to remember your dreams. Destroying a culture’s books is sentencing it to something worse than death: It is sentencing it to seem as if it never lived.”
“Destroying a library is a kind of terrorism. People think of libraries as the safest and most open places in society. Setting them on fire is like announcing that nothing, and nowhere, is safe.”
“Every problem that society has, the library has, too, because the boundary between society and the library is porous; nothing good is kept out of the library, and nothing bad.”
“A library is a good place to soften solitude; a place where you feel part of a conversation that has gone on for hundreds and hundreds of years even when you’re all alone. The library is a whispering post. You don’t need to take a book off a shelf to know there is a voice inside that is waiting to speak to you, and behind that was someone who truly believed that if he or she spoke, someone would listen. It was that affirmation that always amazed me. Even the oddest, most particular book was written with that kind of crazy courage—the writer’s belief that someone would find his or her book important to read. I was struck by how precious and foolish and brave that belief is, and how necessary, and how full of hope it is to collect these books and manuscripts and preserve them. It declares that all these stories matter, and so does every effort to create something that connects us to one another, and to our past and to what is still to come.”
What these passages don’t capture is all the people in the book; Orlean really brings the historical and contemporary characters to life. If you’ve read the book, leave me a comment! And if you’re in the mood for more thought-provoking quotations, take a look at others I have blogged over the years. (I just enjoyed reminiscing over some of them. Bonus: here’s my post on the pleasures of rereading books.)