![]() 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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