Look, I’m just gonna do the thing. Here is (part of) the blurb:
On the morning of April 29, 1986, a fire alarm sounded in the Los Angeles Public Library. As the moments passed, the patrons and staff who had been cleared out of the building realized this was not the usual fire alarm. As one fireman recounted, “Once that first stack got going, it was ‘Goodbye, Charlie.’” The fire was disastrous: it reached 2000 degrees and burned for more than seven hours. By the time it was extinguished, it had consumed four hundred thousand books and damaged seven hundred thousand more. Investigators descended on the scene, but more than thirty years later, the mystery remains: Did someone purposefully set fire to the library—and if so, who?
Weaving her lifelong love of books and reading into an investigation of the fire, award-winning New Yorker reporter and New York Times bestselling author Susan Orlean delivers a mesmerizing and uniquely compelling book that manages to tell the broader story of libraries and librarians in a way that has never been done before.
You should read this book if:
- You like libraries.
- You like books.
- You like history, and the history of libraries.
- You like stories of everyday human life.
- You like true crime.
- You like deep dives into traumatic human events.
- You like fantastically detailed descriptions of how people do their jobs, and why.
- You like character studies of real life, inscrutable, hard to pin down people.
- You like when authors put themselves into the story.
- You like books with pictures in them!
Clearly this is one of those types of books I have trouble writing reviews for. And maybe most of you have already read this! It was published back in 2018. But if you haven’t I very much recommend it.