The Library Book: A Tribute to Books, Reading and the Places Where Our Culture Is Kept.

  

A librarian friend of mine recommended The Library Book by Susan Orleans quite a while ago, but it is only this month that I sat down and started to read it.  And a very good read it is.

 

Orleans who had a love affair with libraries from an early age  set out to tell the story of the Los Angeles Public Library and the fire that nearly swept away its main branch in 1986.  She operates on two time frames.  The first is the history of the library itself, which goes back the mid-19th century. The second is what happened one fateful spring day when somehow the library caught fire, and what happened then: salvaging thousands of books that were waterlogged and/or scorched by fire, rebuilding, and trying to find who set the library on fire.  The book's ante-hero is Harry Peake, a would-be actor and big time fabulator, who confessed more than once to setting the fire, but also denied he knew anything about what had happened that fateful day.

 

The book ends with the rebuilt library open for business and under-current of satisfaction that books, library-lovers, and the great history of collections of the world's knowledge survive against sometimes stiff odds. We never learn who set the library on fire, but we don't care because the books survive.

 

Orlean wrote her book when the shift toward  internet dependence was just beginning: it was published in 2018.  We hear how people still called the library to get information, even though it was becoming very easy to Google a query oneself.  Physical books were the foundation of the library's collection and e-books were somewhat of a novelty.   

 

Time have changed somewhat. Visit any library today and you'll see that the shelves are still filled with physical books, but e-books are now an extremely large portion of collections.  The great increase in e-book use followed the Covid 19 pandemic (the American Library Association says the jump was in 2021-22. ) I know that I had never borrowed on before the Bibliothèque de Montréal shut the doors to its many branches during the lock-down.  Ever vigilant, the library system  added something like 45,000 e-book titles over night early on in the pandemic.  How wonderful it was to be able to have access to books even when I was stuck at home!

 

The habit has endured: I currently have two physical books out of my local library, and two e-books waiting for me on Libby.  I think I'd rather read a physical book, but it is very nice to be able to pull out my phone and pick up where I left off reading an e-book.  That's how I was able to read a good portion of The Library Book while on the bus or in the Métro without lugging a physical book with me everywhere.

Vikram Seth's Passage to India

  

I first went to India in the summer of 1994, or rather it seems that way to me today.  Actually I first set foot on that great subcontinent a decade later when I visited Kerala state, doing research for my book Green City: People, Nature and Urban Places (Véhicule Press, 2007) but in 1994 I spent much of the summer reading Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy.  At nearly 1500 pages it was literally heavy reading even in paperback, but it also transported me to the India of the 1950s so engagingly that I didn't mind the length.

 

The story is simple: a young woman and her mother are on the lookout for a suitable young man for her to marry.  She falls in love with someone who is not acceptable because of his religion (shades of Romeo and Juliet) and she ultimately marries someone who at first glance seems totally unimpressive, but who turns out to have wonderful qualities (shades of Beauty and the Beast.)

 

But far from being a bloated, formulaic Romance, the novel is a detailed, often funny, acutely observed portrait of India at a time of national affirmation.  I couldn't help thinking of it often as I read Kiran Desai's The Loneliness of Sunny and Sonia (book review July 11. )  While Desai writes brilliantly, and tells a multi-faceted story,  the novel stumbles when it enters the realm of magic realism.  Seth is consistently realistic, and the arc of his story is much clearer, on the other hand.  His book is as rewarding a read as a real trip to India can be for those who don't know that corner of the world.

 

After decades of delay, Seth is promising to publish a sequel,  A Suitable Girl in Fall 2026.  In it, the young girl of the first novel is now in her 80s and is trying to find a good match for her grandson.  I'm looking forward to reading it, but perhaps I shouldn't hold my breath since Seth has previously set at least two other publication dates which passed without the book appearing.   

Sonia and Sunny: Pretty Good but Not Stupendous

 

      A friend who is a discerning reader raved to me about Kiran Desai's The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny. "What she does is amazing," she said.  "It's one of the best books I've read in years."

 

Given that kind of praise, you can be sure I quickly went looking for it. Took me a while to get it: I always turn to libraries first, and even though the libraries I belong to have 30 copies among them, I had to wait three and a half months before my turn to read the book came up.

 

Obviously, reviews, word of mouth, and the fact that the book made many "best of 2025" lists has led to lots of people seek it out. However, I think the nearly 700-page novel, while good, is not as stupendous as all that.

 

It tell the stories of two young Indian people from good families from Delhi who have been sent to study in the US in the 1990s.  Sonia finds herself in a small New England town studying literature at an liberal arts college and struggling with cold and loneliness.   Sunny, a little older, has got a master's in journalism and has found a job on the night shift at Associated Press.  Without their knowledge, family members ineptly try to arrange a marriage between them, but the attempt comically falls apart without either of them being aware of what is going on. Sonia becomes involved with brilliant older artist who essentially enslaves her, and from whom she tries to escape throughout the book.  Sunny ultimately rescues her, but it takes hundreds of pages, a lot of magic realism, some brilliant descriptions of India, Mexico, Venice, and New York, before we are given a small glimmer of hope that the pair won't be lonely any more.

 

Desai reportedly spent 20 years working on the book, and it's clear that she struggled to shoe-horn tons of experience into her story.  There are moments which are wonderful, but there are others when this reader just wanted to get the end. 

 

Verdict: a book to take on vacation if you expect to have a lot of down time.  Don't expect to bowled over by it, however.