2019 Summer reading challenge: Back to school: Read a book about a subject you don't know much about

[baronessekat]

The Library Book by Susan Orlean

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Very interesting microhistory combined with True-crime. I had never heard of the Los Angeles Public Library Fire before this book (not surprising as I was 13 and living on a different coast at the time). But the idea of a library fire at all, let alone the one of this magnitude, breaks my heart at imagining all the precious things and knowledge that were lost forever.

This book flips chapter to chapter from being an investigation into the fire and a history of the library. I liked this approach very much.

The thing that brought it down for me was that I did this as an audiobook and the author was the reader. Not a deal breaker but I found her delivery a bit flat and it was hard to believe she, herself, was excited or interested in the topic. This audiobook may have benefited from a professional narrator. Not to mention that she kept stumbling over titles of books that she references at the beginning of every chapter if those titles happened to be in other languages (she seemed to have a very hard time pronouncing German books).

There is a specific audience for this book, and I will say I am certainly part of it.



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