🔹 The Library Book by Susan Orlean

Rating: 5 of 5 stars ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

By: Kato Justus 

Susan Orlean’s “The Library Book” is brilliant and I’m glad to have read it. It’s beautifully written, painstakingly researched. Her storytelling is captivating and masterful. Every time I read about the destruction of what was lost, I felt anguish, even grief. Now I understand how libraries are vital living, breathing entities, places of community, hands-on museums—a place where everyone is equally rich with the treasures therein. 

It’s fascinating to me how libraries survived the world’s entry into the digital age. They could have gone the way of dinosaurs and become redundant, unnecessary places. Instead, librarians not only embraced the inevitable march of technology but pressed it further by imagining, reimagining, constantly seeking how to renew, to be relative, and helpful community centers with a heartbeat and breath. They operated in the future a hundred years before the future became the past. That is truly visionary. From the start, the core mission and vision of these tremendous leaders ensure libraries will always thrive, always be relevant because they bring the memories of humanity, community, and information together in a manner no other place or thing can. The book made me realize the loss of a library is a violation of humanity, a grievous genocide, a form of terror to be vigilant against.

Regarding the mystery of why the L.A. Central Library burned...was it caused by an act of arson perpetrated by Harry Peak or faulty wiring of an old building? I’m as undecided as is the author. At one point, I thought Harry responsible. It wasn’t his lying or his many versions of what he was doing that morning. It was the fact Harry knocked over the elderly lady when leaving the library. To me, it means he was back glancing over his shoulder, not paying attention to where he was going, worried and in a rush to get away from something he had done, worried someone might be pursuing him. Afraid and in a hurry. That action alone speaks to me of a consciousness of guilt. However, if he did start the fire, I don’t think he did so with ill intent. If he did do it, it would have been a thoughtless, dangerous act of adolescent negligence that got out of hand. 

The other possibility is an electrical short. As stuffed as those deep stacks were, it wouldn’t take much for one of those 40-watt bulbs to start a fire. It was so very dark down there, perhaps, some well-intended employee, in a rush to see something used a 75-watt bulb (because it was what was available when they went to look for a lightbulb) that then led to the fire?

Try as I might, I cannot criticize even one aspect of this book. Orlean’s investigative research left no stone unturned, and her writing is crisp and elegant. It’s perfect. It is educational, tragic, haunting, and illuminating. If I had read this book, I would have considered becoming a librarian. This book will make you want to be a librarian. It is a truly noble, heroic career.