THE LIBRARY BOOK by Susan Orlean

I read this book with my ears. I wished for photos and illustrations, but I just can't own every book I read. But I wanted this one. I really wanted this one, considering my 25-year history working in libraries and a lifetime of loving libraries and simply the idea of libraries. I read it with my ears, meaning I listened to the author read it as I drove around in my car. Susan Orlean is one of my top-shelf favorite Creative Nonfiction authors of all time, so it was a treat to hear her interpret her work just for me. Then my friend, Sue, a different Susan, told me that she got me a book for Christmas and she hoped I hadn't read it...and I pulled the red-covered book out of the wrapping... and gleefully shrieked, "I DID read it, BUT I really wanted to HAVE it!" I was so happy. After listening to Susan O.'s descriptions of the L.A. Public Library, and the person of interest who may have set it on fire, and other interesting personalities in the history of libraries, I now have photos of them and the correct spellings of their names, and I can re-read sections any time I want. I am so happy. YAY!

The Library Book, (Simon & Schuster, 2018), is the story of the big L.A. Library fire of 1986 told in-depth with information about events leading up to, stuff happening simultaneously, and things that happened after. That story alone is compelling, but I mentioned Susan Orlean writes Creative Nonfiction. She goes in and out of library history, and then back to the L.A. story, and never loses the reader's interest. I don't know if you are aware of this, but you can check with my friends who have heard my stories: libraries are not boring. Susan Orlean, lover of libraries, has done her research and interviewed people, and come up with fascinating stories to weave into the tale of the 1986 California fire.

Orlean pays homage to the institution of libraries, and the idea of libraries, and the movers and shakers of the library world, past and present. The Library Book got a lot of positive buzz in late 2018 when it was released and made it onto many end-of-the-year best-of lists. In this digital age, when I still get questions from the unenlightened about the future of libraries and librarians, this is sweet validation. (We'll always need human brains to organize information, retrieve it efficiently, and teach other humans how to retrieve it.) This is a treasure of a book and should be required reading (or listening) for everyone, enlightened or not.

A librarian reading The Library Book in a library

The Pine Barrens by John McPhee

I was never a scientist. I was only briefly a science student because it was required. Nonetheless, one of the most critical life-changing events of my teenage life happened because of a research paper assigned by a high school Biology teacher. All of the students in the class were required to write a research paper about the Pine Barrens region of our home state of New Jersey. My friend and I did not know how to approach this, so upon arriving at the Hamilton Public Library we mustered up courage to ask the reference librarian. Of course we expected her to be mean, aren't all librarians? We were so young. That librarian took the time to show us how to look up newspaper articles in the New York Times Index (big red books) and The Reader's Guide to Periodic Literature (fat green books). I had no idea that the library saved old issues of magazines and newspapers and could retrieve them if you asked for them with the titles, dates, and volume numbers listed in the big red and green books. This was huge. "Not all of the newspapers and magazines will be in print," she probably said, and I can make an educated guess about this because I've been teaching library patrons about these mysteries of knowledge for 25+ years now. "The newspapers and magazines we don't have in print will likely be on microfilm, like The New York Times which we have back to its beginning." I remember being stunned. We looked up the Pine Barrens, found the dates and pages we needed, and the librarian taught us how to use the giant microfilm readers similar to the one Brick added to his family's living room decor on the TV show, "The Middle."

The librarian had helped other students with the Pine Barrens topic, so she was able to recommend a compelling read about the region by author John McPhee. The Pine Barrens (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1968) was the first nonfiction book that wowed me to the point of wanting to be a nonfiction

writer myself someday. First I had to study Music Theory and Library Science, and then I finally got around to advanced study in Creative Writing. (I received my MFA in July.) But anyway, THAT BOOK is so compelling that I bought my own copy with my allowance and savored it. McPhee told us about a certain treefrog that only lives in the Pine Barrens, and how the cranberries grow there in bogs where they are harvested by local residents called Pineys. Pineys work "the cycle" which is a string of jobs relating to the Pine Barrens environment including cranberry harvests, blueberry harvests, and sphagnum moss collecting. (Both berries grow well in the sandy soil of that region.) It was fascinating then and it is still fascinating now. The book might be somewhat dated, but it is still in print which should tell you something. McPhee's writing style includes interviews with experts on whatever topic, and I can imagine him asking at the conclusion of an interview, "Who should I talk to next?"

Read the book. I wouldn't steer you wrong, would I?

The reason The Pine Barrens is on my mind is that John McPhee, a Princeton native, has just released a book called Draft No. 4: On the Writing Process, (also Farrar, Straus and Giroux) in which he writes about writing. I love reading writing about writing. I'm savoring each essay, reading slow. Slow reading. Savoring. The second essay included, to my delight and fascination, a story about McPhee when he was preparing to write The Pine Barrens, and I hadn't formulated my nonfiction research organizing strategy yet, but oh how I wish we could have collaborated on that book!

that Pine Barrens book, and he didn't know how to go about it. There was so much information, coming from research, interviews, and observations, that he put himself flat on his back on a backyard picnic table and just thought about organization and about all that research. After a few days he figured out a strategy to mold all that information into a logical story, and he got up off the picnic table and went to his typewriter to write it. (Yes, he did leave the table to eat and sleep he assures us.) This fascinates me because it is a story about how a favorite author wrote one of my all-time favorite books. It delights me because I'm teaching an actual 3-credit nonfiction writing course next semester on how to organize research for nonfiction prose into a coherent story. I was 5 when McPhee was writing The Pine Barrens, and I hadn't formulated my strategy for organizing research for nonfiction yet. What an interesting conversation we would have had!