Book Report: The Library Book

4. Susan Orlean, The Library Book (2018) (2/4/24)

Another case of a book I've had for ages (as witness its hardbound status) and finally pulled off the shelf and settled in to read. And I'm glad I did. It's a wonderful book, kicked off by the raging fire at Los Angeles's Central Library on April 28, 1986—which burned for more than seven hours and destroyed or damaged more than a million books—but really about so much more: the early history of LA, the changing nature of libraries as enduring civic institutions, the fraught business of arson investigation, and so many personalities, from early pioneers up through the individuals safeguarding free access to knowledge and literature worldwide today. Orlean clearly had a ball infusing herself into the realm of librarians, sleuthing the mystery of the fire, and considering the very meaning of books in our lives.

It's impossible to summarize the book any further: it is jam-packed with fascinating information and people, and veers now one way, now another. It's almost like being in a library, surrounded by an entire universe of facts and fancies. So I'll just quote a couple of passages that I flagged. First, from early on:

In the physics of fire, there is a chemical phenomenon known as a stoichiometric condition, in which a fire achieves the perfect burning ratio of oxygen to fuel—in other words,, there is exactly enough air available for the fire to consume all of what it is burning. Such a ratio creates an ideal fire situation, which results in perfect combustion... [It] is almost impossible to create outside of a laboratory... [I]n a sense, it is more theoretical than actual. Many firefighters have never seen such a blaze and never will. Not long ago, I had coffee with a man named Ron Hamel. He is now an arson investigator, but at the time of the library fire, Hamel was a captain in the fire department. Although over thirty years have passed, he remains awed by what he saw that day at the library. He talked about it like someone might talk about seeing a UFO. In his decades with the department, Hamel fought thousands of fires, but he said he never experienced another that was as exceptional as the fire at Central Library. Usually, a fire is red and orange and yellow and black. The fire in the library was colorless. You could look right through it, as if it were a sheet of glass. Where the flame had any color, it was pale blue. It was so hot tht it appeared icy. Hamel said he felt like he was standing inside a blacksmith's forge. "We though we were looking at the bowels of hell," he said, tapping his coffee mug. "Combustion that complete is almost impossible to achieve, but in this case, it was achieved. It was surreal. Frank Borden, who now runs the Los Angeles Fire Department Museum, once said to me, "In every firefighter's career, there are those fires that are extraordinary and unforgettable. This was one of those."

You see: interesting information, beautiful description, the human touch. Every topic Orlean approaches has this breadth. She's a wonderful writer.

And from the very end, where she describes a late-afternoon visit to the now-rebuilt library, after the crowds had thinned out:

The silence was more soothing than solemn. A library is a good place to soften solitude; a place where you feel part of a conversation that has gone on for hundreds and hundreds of years even when you're all alone. The library is a whispering post. You don't need to take a book off a shelf to know there is a voice inside that is speaking to you, and behind that was someone who truly believed that if he or she spoke, someone would listen. It was that affirmation that always amazed me. Even the oddest, most particular book was written with that kind of crazy courage—the writer's believe that someone would find his or her book important to read. I was struck by how precious and foolish and brave that belief is, and how necessary, and how full of hope it is to collect these books and manuscripts and preserve them. It declares that all these stories matter, and so does every effort to create something that connects us to one another, and to our past and to what is still to come. 

And yes, Orlean's own curiosity and sensibilities and storytelling passion shines through consistently as well. She feels like a friend. (She feels that way on FB as well: a little quirky, approachable. The only other book of hers I've read is The Orchid Thief, which is similarly engaging. I may have to seek her out more.)