The Library Book by Susan Orlean: A Review

Susan Orlean: Photo Credit @susanorlean

Susan Orlean's THE LIBRARY BOOK burns with the brilliance of her love of libraries.

She observes: "Books are a sort of cultural DNA, the code for who, as a society, we are, and what we know. All the wonders and failures, all the champions and villains, all the legends and ideas and revelations of a culture last forever in its books."

The theme of her novel is the great fire in the Central Library of Los Angeles on April 28, 1986. A fire so intense that it reached 2000 degrees while burning over 400,000 books and damaging another 700,000 in the course of a seven-hour rampage through the shelves.

Orlean uses her considerable journalistic skills to give us quite an inside story of the Central Library and the development of the LA library system, including intriguing glimpses into many of the LA system's early head librarians.

Along the way, we're introduced to Harry Peak, who was suspected but never proven to be, the arsonist behind the linguistic inferno. Peak was a handsome, attention-starved would-be actor, who comes across as likable, but with a strong tendency towards lying.

Orlean also shares the beginnings of her love of libraries, starting with the Bertram Woods branch of the Shaker Heights Public Library. "Throughout my childhood, starting when I was very young, I went there several times a week with my mother. On those visits, my mother and I walked in together but as soon as we passed through the door, we split up and each headed to our favorite section. The library might have been the first place I was ever given autonomy..."

"Those visits were dreamy, frictionless interludes that promised I would leave richer than I arrived."

Orlean took years to research and complete THE LIBRARY BOOK and her persistence and skill are reflected on each page of the book. Also worth noting is that her Orlean's mother passed away during it's writing - she had dementia and her memory was eroding during this time.

Towards the end of THE LIBRARY BOOK, Orlean slips back to LA's Central Library shortly after a new addition had been built and the Central Library was rededicated for public use. "I thought about my mother, who died when I was halfway done with this book, and I knew how pleased she would have been to see me in the library, and I was able to use that thought to transport myself for a split second to a time when I was young and she was in the moment, alert and tender, with years ahead of her, and she was beaming at me as I toddled to the checkout counter with an armload of books. I knew that if we had come here together, to this enchanted place of stucco and statuary and all the stories in the world for us to have, she would have reminded me just about now that if she could have chosen any profession in the world, she would have been a librarian."