I was obviously intrigued by the description of this book immediately. What bibliophile wouldn't be? I, too, grew up in a library and would have been devastated (would still be devastated) to see my local branc burn down. But what started as a high stakes and eerie sort of profile of the fire and its main suspect became a sort of long-winded history of the Los Angeles public library system as a whole. And while I learned a lot, not all of the tidbits and facts were necessarily interesting, and because the book jumps back and forth a lot, I lost the thread of interest somewhere amidst the halfway point. I think this book could have been stronger were it about only the fire or if it were a book of essays about the library that included an essay about the fire.

I'm a sucker for a book about books or anything to do with books (reading, writing, etc.). I seriously regret that I never worked in a library and this book provided a great behind the scenes look at library work and any librarian's worst fear - fire. I don't remember the fire at the LA public library although I was in high school when it happened, but this book brings the whole thing vibrantly alive and you feel the anguish of the staff and the frustration of the investigators.

A must read for any book lover!

If you have any interest in libraries and what they mean to local communities this is the book for you. Following the history of the LLos Angeles public library Ms. Orlean “ investigates”the horrific fire that decimated the collection in the late 80’s. Although there is no specific answer to THAT mystery, the stories surrounding this public library are fascinating.

Absolutely fascinating! Susan Orlean is a treasure. I savored this every word of this book. Highly recommend for any book lover or history buff!

If a memoir can be written about a place this book would be it. Centering on a fire in 1986 this book tells the story of the central branch of the Los Angeles Public Library. The history of the library is told through accounts of its establishment and growth and the people who made it happen. The author uses her love of books and libraries to make it more personal. Anyone who has ever visited and cared for a library should read this thoroughly researched and well written book.

I absolutely adored this book. I've never read anything by Orlean but I am a librarian and this was the best book I've ever read about libraries. It explained all our intricacies in a way that regular readers would understand, and care about! It's hard to make the day-to-day life of libraries not sound boring. I also loved the interwoven story of the fire in LA. No one I work with had heard about it and these people have been working in libraries since the 1980s, so they should have! Such a great story and great information. Loved!

This story of the Los Angeles Public Library fire was something I had never heard of before, and as a lover of books and libraries, it immediately peaked my interest. While I learned a lot of fascinating facts from some particularly interesting chapters (especially the few on the library and the people who ran it from the late 1800s on) I found this ultimately to be a bit of a dry story that was difficult to latch on to. Though not a fast or always fully engaging read, I’d still recommend this story to bibliophiles who are interested in learning more about the history of this one LA library!

Very interesting story of a great fire. I really enjoyed this one. Scary to think how fast fire spreads.

I love books about mundane things made interesting. the library is a miraculous place and this book makes us appreciate it all the more. i would recommend this book to all book and library lovers.

Amazing book for all who love libraries. It is packed with so much interesting information that I was surprised by its content. It is the story of the largest library fire in the history of our country. Also a bio on every librarian from its start. There is also a mystery regarding who set the fire. I recommend it all who love libraries.

5★
“All the things that are wrong in the world seem conquered by a library’s simple unspoken promise: Here is my story, please listen; here I am, please tell me your story.”

For many people, I imagine libraries are like places of worship - everyone is made to feel welcome and part of a greater community.

In the case of a library, it’s a community not only of readers, but also of people looking for someone to answer their questions, migrants taking literacy classes, people needing help with bureaucratic forms, teens wanting a safe place to hang out, collectors with memorabilia to donate . . . the list is endless . . . although it does eventually end with homeless people seeking a safe place to sit out of the weather. (If they fall asleep, they may be turfed out.)

The Los Angeles Public Library has had a particularly lively history and some unbelievably colourful people running it. Charles Lummis was one of the most charismatic and peculiar men around, I suspect, even in the wilds of Los Angeles in 1885.

Lummis was in Ohio when he was hired, and he decided to walk from Ohio to California, ostensibly to find out about America, but really to make an entrance when he got there. And he did. His “tramp” was covered by the newspapers and he was famous by the time he arrived. It all helps with funding!

This is him in his sombrero and bright green, wide-wale, corduroy suit with red Indian-patterned cummerbund which he wore all the time. He’d fit right in with today’s Hollywood.

[My Goodreads review includes a photograph of Charles Lummis.]

The author introduces each chapter with the library details of various books that might apply to the chapter. The central story is about the LA library and the devastating fire, but the history of early libraries and its own establishment are woven in with the details of the fire and the mystery surrounding the suspected arsonist.

Susan Orlean is a well-regarded author and is also a staff writer at The New Yorker Magazine, so you know you’re in good hands. What could have been a dry history book is more like investigative journalism, with plenty of gossip and innuendo – this is Los Angeles, remember! Lummis was famous for his drunken parties and wild friends, and his section of the book reads like something out of the hippy days nearly a century later. There really is nothing new under the sun.

I won’t attempt to summarise Orlean’s excellent research or the police hunt for the perpetrator, but I do want to mention some of the book-burnings she describes. She even tried to burn one herself, to see what it would feel like, but she had a terrible time bringing herself to do it.

“Once words and thoughts are poured into them, books are no longer just paper and ink and glue: They take on a kind of human vitality. The poet Milton called this quality in books ‘the potency of life.’ I wasn’t sure I had it in me to be a killer.”

In another part of the world:

“In Senegal, the polite expression for saying someone died is to say his or her library has burned.”

They say that history belongs to those who write it. That’s true – to a point.

“The first recorded instance of book burning was in 213 BC, when Chinese emperor Qin Shi Huang decided to incinerate any history books that contradicted his version of the past. In addition, he buried more than four hundred scholars alive.”

What a frightening thought. But then in our own time, during WW2, the Holocaust attempted to wipe out an entire people, including the books.

“Special book-burning squads known as ‘Brenn-Kommandos’ were sent out to burn libraries and synagogues.
. . .
“By the end of the war, more than one third of all the books in Germany were gone.”

Meanwhile, back in the States

“In the 1940s, for instance, a schoolteacher named Mabel Riddle, with the support of the Catholic Church, began a campaign to collect and burn comic books because of their energetic portrayal of crime and sex. . . many local parishes sponsored their own comic-book fires. In a few instances, nuns lit the first match.”
. . .
“Destroying a culture’s books is sentencing it to something worse than death: It is sentencing it to seem as if it never lived.”

Back to Los Angeles. The fire and its aftermath are described in horrifying detail, but the amazing thing is that it’s the water from the firefighting that causes so much damage. Mould and mildew are as bad as fire. Did you know you have to freeze a wet book to salvage it? What do you do with thousands of them? The fish markets! The logistics of packing wet books, moving, storing, freezing, rebuilding the library are extensive and exhausting.

Oh, one more thing. When pseudo-science books started becoming popular, Lummis instituted his own “Literary Pure Food Act”, branded the books with a “poison” symbol, and added inserts.

“The cards, shaped like bookmarks, said, ‘For Later and More Scientific Treatment of This Subject, Consult______,’ followed by a blank space for librarians to list better books on the topic.”

More libraries, more librarians, sombreros and all!

Thanks to NetGalley and Simon and Schuster for the preview copy of this fascinating bit of history.
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Thank you to NetGalley for this free arc in exchange for my honest review

Well this is any bibliophiles worst nightmare of a book. It follows the story of a fire in 1986 that destroyed over a million books at a library in L.A

I requested this book having no idea what it was about but was drawn by the cover and the idea that it may be set in or around a library but I had no idea what I was setting myself up for!

I liked that it is non fiction as I’ve been trying to get into more non fiction this year with very little luck but this was so so heavy.

After the first chapter I was thinking yeah it’s interesting but how do you write a whole book about this tragedy... apparently by dedicating a whole chapter about fire... a would be pyromaniacs wet dream but sadly it was a bit dull for me

The whole story just made me so sad, why would you set a library on fire ffs! If you like fire so much then set one somewhere where no books have to be harmed!

This was just a bit dry for me, the writing was good I really can’t fault that but it just wasn’t my cup of tea really

I couldn’t have loved this book more. It’s an engaging hybrid of a whodunnit, a far-from-stuffy history of libraries in general and the Los Angeles Central Library in particular, and a series of colorful profiles of the many dedicated librarians, known and unknown, who serve with dedication. The book embodies Orleans’s cheerful, curious, open-hearted personality perfectly.

Thank you to NetGalley and Simon and Schuster for allowing me to read The Library Book, by Susan Orlean. A devastating fire in Los Angeles, April 29, 1986, practically destroyed the Los Angeles Public Library; but the people who loved this library, the books, and knowledge, worked tirelessly for over 6 years to rebuild, in the midst of the trial of Harry, who may have set the fire.This book tells us what it takes to restore books, how much it cost, who helps libraries rebuild, and the good things libraries do for all kinds of people and groups. I love my school library (and my librarian), public library (and the great ladies who are always there with a smile), Overdrive and Cloud services, so this book meant a lot to me.

Extraordinary. Never thought I would well up over a non-fiction book about a library fire, but Orleans' magnetic and lush love letter to this integral part of society captivated and moved me. Part who-dunnit, part historical document, this very alive piece not only reminds us of the sociological importance of libraries, but also of the unique rewards of reading. Irresistible for anyone who loves to bury themselves in a book or needs a reminder of the wide ranging privileges libraries can and have delivered.

Although this is primarily an account of the unsolved 1986 fire that engulfed the Los Angeles Central Library that destroyed over 400,000 books and damaged another 700,000 it is much more than this as it looks at the history and the development of the public library system in the USA and its continued relevance and importance in today's faced paced ever changing world. From a UK perspective the content had much relevance owing to the draconian and politically expedient cuts that local councils have undertaken in recent years. Since 2010 the administration of hundreds of local libraries have been handed over from the local authorities to be run by local volunteers with an estimated 500 of the Uk's 3,850 libraries now being run by public spirited unpaid members of the community. I believe that the term used by the councils when pursuing this policy is "divesting" which in reality means that for local people they face a stark choice of either running it themselves or face closure. It was good to read that ostensibly at least it seems that the public library service in the USA seems to be in more robust health.

Susan Orlean is journalist and author famous for her contributions to the New Yorker and the writer of the acclaimed The Orchid Thief which was filmed with the title Adaptation in 2002 with Meryl Streep playing the Susan Orlean role. The central narrative of the Library Book is an investigation into whether a fantasist unsuccessful actor called Harry Peak who was the only suspect was the person setting fire to the library. This did he or did he not do it forms part of the overall narrative that looks at the history of the Los Angeles Central Library (and the wider national system), the people who have shaped it and the challenges that it has faced in the past and must confront in the future not least the number of homeless people that frequent it.

For many people for whom the public library has been and remains an integral part of their lives I think this will articulate many of the feelings we have towards them. To quote Virginia Woolf " I ransack public libraries and find them full of sunk treasure'. The writing is clear and concise and has a nice mixture of factual and philosophising. Whether the mystery has been resolved is up to the reader to decide but ultimately this becomes of secondary importance as that most democratic of institutions where we can read what, when and how is celebrated and its full cultural and political importance underlined. A strongly recommended read.

Some of the fondest childhood memories I have were of my Mother taking me to the library. I held my Moms hand as we walked in and as so as I saw my section, I begged to let go of her hand as I nearly ran to grab new books that my parents and I would read together. My Mother’s arms were full of mysteries, best sellers, biographies, cookbooks and of course, my books. I loved seeing my Mom stack the books on the counter and then that sound. The sound of the library clerk stamping the library card with the due date in each book.
As I grew older, I was allowed to ride my bike to the library and using my own library card, I ventured to the teen sectiion for the latest Judy Blume book. Now as adult, my love of the library continues as I carry more books than I should to the counter to hear the electronic beep of knowing that for three weeks, those books are mine.
The Library has been an essential part of my life so I was thrilled to have a chance to read Susan Orlean’s new book, The Library Book.
This nonfictional account of the 1986 fire of the Los Angeles Central Library. Orlean recounts in The Library Book, the fire that destroyed over 400,000 books and damaged another 700,000 more in the span of seven hours.
The fire and the mystery of who set the fire alone would be a compelling tale by itself but Orlean gives us so much more.
According to the Public Library Manifesto published by UNESCO, “The library is a prerequisite to let citizens make use of their right to information and freedom of speech. Free access to information is necessary in a democratic society, for open debate and creation of public opinion.”
Orlean goes to great lengths and depth to showcase the importance and role of libraries in our communities. The Library Book is such a captivating novel with a blend of mystery, history and thorough analysis of the future of libraries.
Read Susan Orlean’s novel and you will have visited the mystery, geography, biography, humor, history and political sections of a library all in one book. Thank you to Netgalley for an advance copy of this book. My reviews are fair and unbiased. #netgalley #thelibrarybook

Seriously? How interesting could a book about the Los Angeles Public Library fire in 1986 be? In short, it is gripping! Awesome! Superb! Even a bibliophile, like this reviewer, was skeptical, but Susan Orlean has blown it out of the water! Her thorough research and accessible writing style make both the history of the fire and the library itself absolutely riveting. I don't give five stars readily but this book deserves six!

I received a free copy of this ebook via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

This is a wonderful book. It is a book about libraries. It is an ode to libraries and is written beautifully. This book is also part mystery as it deals with the burning down of the L.A. Library. I would recommend this book to anyone who loves libraries and books.

I would like to thank Netgalley and the publisher for providing me with a review copy in exchange for my honest and unbiased opinion of it.

This is a lightweight account of the history of the LA Public Library and the fire that occurred there in 1986. Due to the author's fame, I'm sure this will be a best-seller and that readers will rave about it. I, however, found it to be too-frequently superficial and full of unfortunate literary license-taking. The information on the science of fire is scientifically inaccurate and extremely romanticized; similarly, the material on music scores is also incorrect. Perhaps the ultimate ill-considered anecdote in the book--one that caused me long moments of fury over Orlean's trademark sense of entitlement--was Orlean's utterly banal and irresponsible decision to burn a copy of Fahrenheit 451 (what else?) outdoors (on a cookie sheet, as if that makes it safe) in LA County, where she writes about deliberately disregarding the burn bans in place to protect the city and its surroundings.