Nowadays, I mainly go to the Northeast Branch of the Seattle Public Library. While raising our young family in Greece, it was sometimes difficult to find enough English language books to fuel the fires of my reading addiction, as I recount in my essay called “ Treasure Hunt: Searching for Books in Thessaloniki,” although we had access to some of the best libraries in the city. Later, in my teen years, after I had come to the realization that I was a writer, I discovered the science fiction shelves at the Henry Branch and in particular the Nebula Awards volumes. I would usually come home with a significant heap of literary treasures. When our family lived on lower Capital Hill in Seattle, my mother would drive me and my siblings to the Henry Branch Library on top of Capital Hill so we could explore the shelves and check out books. And so the ever curious Orlean began a several-year immersion into the history of the fire, the library and its supporting cast, past and present, and the unsolved arson investigation.Libraries have been some of my favorite places on Earth ever since I was a child. Shortly thereafter, touring the downtown Central Library - a massive architectural achievement built in 1926 - she offhandedly learned about the big fire when her tour guide mentioned that some of the books still smelled of smoke. Orlean writes: “It was decades ago and I was three thousand miles away, but I felt like I was lifted up and whisked back to that precise time and place, back to the scenario of walking into the library with my mother.” Orlean was just learning about the city herself when she took him to a branch library and experienced a poignant memory of going to the library with her own mother in Shaker Heights, Ohio. Her first-grade son, tasked to interview a city employee, chose to talk to a librarian. Orlean and her family moved to Los Angeles in 2011 when her husband took a new job. But this book is about more than a physical place, or even a public space: “In truth, a library is as much a portal as it is a place - it is a transit point, a passage.”
In “My Kind of Place,” her collection of long-form journalism, most published in the New Yorker, she even wrote about my hometown of Midland, Texas, and she nailed it.
Orlean has written perceptively and artfully about locations before. And it’s about a wannabe actor who may or may not have set the largest library fire in the history of the United States. Susan Orlean’s “The Library Book” is a book lover’s dream and nightmare.Ībout a particular public library, Los Angeles Central, and its 1986 fire that burned for more than seven hours, destroying 400,000 books and damaging 700,000 more, Orlean’s book is also tangentially about Los Angeles, the city of self-invention.
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