Technical Difficulties

The Library Book by Susan Orlean

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


In 1986, the Los Angeles Public Library's Central Library suffered a catastrophic fire ... on the same day as Chernobyl. The first thing Susan Orlean is doing in this book is telling the story of that fire, the terrible scope of the disaster, the heroic efforts made to save the books (including freezing those with water damage and finding remarkable ways to get the water out of them again), the equally heroic efforts made to save the building from being torn down, and the torturous path of the investigation into the cause of the fire. Along the way, she also recounts the history of the Los Angeles Public Library and of Central Library itself and provides a series of meditations/interviews with Central Library employees on what a library is and what it does and how what it does is changing as new technology comes along.

For my day job, I work as the administrative assistant for a small public library, so a lot of what Orlean was talking about, in terms of the idea of the library, was familiar to me. My library is doing (on a very small scale) the same things that Central Library is doing, and I found the comparison fascinating. Also, I think Orlean is spot-on in her ideas about what a library IS and what it DOES, that it isn't just a repository of books, but an information hub, a place where literally everyone is welcome (and how many of those are there?), and a place where people, from babies to senior citizens, can come (or be brought, in the case of babies) and find help or education or entertainment or simply a safe space to be in for a while.

I also appreciated her investigation into the investigation of the fire, and the fact that she dug hard enough to find out that there have been dramatic changes in arson investigation since 1986, and that she therefore reevaluated the investigation, coming to the conclusion, instead of that it must be arson, that there's no way to tell how the fire started, but odds are it was accidental and did not involve human agency.

(I caught her in one incidental factual error. The silent-film actress Olive Thomas did not "overdose" on her husband's syphilis medication: she accidentally drank a topical preparation of mercury bichloride, which killed her slowly and horribly. It is pedantic and nitpicky of me to point this out, but I accept those as flaws in my character.)

Overall, this is an excellent, thoughtful, and extremely interesting book about books and libraries. It is elegantly written, and Orlean's own love of libraries comes shining through.

Four and a half stars, round up to five.



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