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. 

Dobryd, or How One Little Girl Survived Disaster

 

The first sentence of Ann Charney's Dobryd is chilling: "By the time I was five years old, I had spent half my life hidden away in a barn loft." Those words took my breath away when I first read them many years ago. Yet the novel's unsentimental, clear-eyed vision offers hope that, with luck, the human spirit can blossom under the most dreadful circumstances.

Dobryd was published in Canada in the mid-1970s to a few, very good reviews. But despite high praise, it wasn't a commercial success. Last year, however, Baraka Books brought out a new edition, giving current readers a chance to read one of the best chronicles of life as a civilian in wartime ever written. 

The story is simple: After two and a half years hiding outside a small town in Poland, a five-year-old girl, her mother, her aunt, and her cousin along with four other adults, all Jews, are rescued by Russian soldiers as World War II draws to a close.

The child is at first terrified by the reaction of the people in her little world: "Weeping and laughing at the same time, they hugged me and embraced one another. I felt smothered in their arms. These embraces were not the ones I was used to; too tight, too close. I was frightened." And, looking outside the barn for the first time, she says: "A large orange circle covered the sky and coloured the world below. The fields, the animals, the farmhouse, all were illuminated in this strange, intense, blood-like colour.I heard myself scream, again and again."

The scream is the one that she has been prevented from letting out during their long period of hiding. Finally Yuri, the Russian soldier who has been carrying her, calms her. "My new friend.carried me outside. All the while his soft voice reassured me, and the sound of those words made me feel safe.. The fresh air of the summer evening felt soothing against my skin. I looked around me. I was no longer afraid."

But the privations she has suffered do not make an occasion for sorrow and regret. Charney says her book is an attempt to distance herself from the work of other survivors of Nazi oppression like Elie Wiesel and André Schwarz-Bart. "I didn't find my experience in their books, and I didn't want to spend my life following the narrow lane of lamentations," she says.

"I wanted to show that one can live through all that and still go on to be a whole human being. I wanted to have the world as my oyster the way it is for other people, and I wanted to feel free to go on to explore other things." She adds with emphasis: "One should really exalt life." That's why the book begins as it does with the liberation, and why there is so much about pleasure: ice cream, the feel of air on skin, the joy of being able to see further than four walls.

The book is also full of  love and luck. Charney was lucky enough to be born to a mother who was strong and clever and had enough resources to pay for help. Then once they were in hiding, the adults around her doted on her, teaching her to read and write, to knit, to sing. Afterwards Yuri became her special friend, and the champion of the family. It is from these repeated experiences of love and attention that Charney has built a sensibility that allows her to say that she had a "happy childhood".

Read it!The first sentence of Ann Charney's Dobryd is chilling: "By the time I was five years old, I had spent half my life hidden away in a barn loft." Those words took my breath away when I first read them many years ago. Yet the novel's unsentimental, clear-eyed vision offers hope that, with luck, the human spirit can blossom under the most dreadful circumstances.

Dobryd was published in Canada in the mid-1970s to a few, very good reviews. But despite high praise, it wasn't a commercial success. Last year, however, Baraka Books brought out a new edition, giving current readers a chance to read one of the best chronicles of life as a civilian in wartime ever written. 

The story is simple: After two and a half years hiding outside a small town in Poland, a five-year-old girl, her mother, her aunt, and her cousin along with four other adults, all Jews, are rescued by Russian soldiers as World War II draws to a close.

The child is at first terrified by the reaction of the people in her little world: "Weeping and laughing at the same time, they hugged me and embraced one another. I felt smothered in their arms. These embraces were not the ones I was used to; too tight, too close. I was frightened." And, looking outside the barn for the first time, she says: "A large orange circle covered the sky and coloured the world below. The fields, the animals, the farmhouse, all were illuminated in this strange, intense, blood-like colour.I heard myself scream, again and again."

The scream is the one that she has been prevented from letting out during their long period of hiding. Finally Yuri, the Russian soldier who has been carrying her, calms her. "My new friend.carried me outside. All the while his soft voice reassured me, and the sound of those words made me feel safe.. The fresh air of the summer evening felt soothing against my skin. I looked around me. I was no longer afraid."

But the privations she has suffered do not make an occasion for sorrow and regret. Charney says her book is an attempt to distance herself from the work of other survivors of Nazi oppression like Elie Wiesel and André Schwarz-Bart. "I didn't find my experience in their books, and I didn't want to spend my life following the narrow lane of lamentations," she says.

"I wanted to show that one can live through all that and still go on to be a whole human being. I wanted to have the world as my oyster the way it is for other people, and I wanted to feel free to go on to explore other things." She adds with emphasis: "One should really exalt life." That's why the book begins as it does with the liberation, and why there is so much about pleasure: ice cream, the feel of air on skin, the joy of being able to see further than four walls.

The book is also full of  love and luck. Charney was lucky enough to be born to a mother who was strong and clever and had enough resources to pay for help. Then once they were in hiding, the adults around her doted on her, teaching her to read and write, to knit, to sing. Afterwards Yuri became her special friend, and the champion of the family. It is from these repeated experiences of love and attention that Charney has built a sensibility that allows her to say that she had a "happy childhood".

Read it!

When Books Complement Each Other: Little Women and March

  

The first "chapter book" I ever read was Little Women by Louisa May Alcott.  It ws a Christmas present when I was in second grade, and it took me to March (yes! that long) to read the first part.  But after I got that far, I found myself a committed reader, and it's been one book after another ever since.  It is hard to underestimate the effect of the book on me in other ways as well: I've often said that my political, social and moral ideas are rooted in the striving of the four March girls, the Little Women.

 

Set during the American Civil War, the book tells of their domestic ups and downs as they struggle to do the right thing, and worry about their father who has enlisted  in  the Union army as  a  chaplain. Mr. March is not a well-defined character, however, so despite his central place in the psychological geography of the family, the reader knows very little about who he really is.

 

Geraldine Brooks fills that gap.  Her

March tells the story of what he does when he is with the army, how he painfully arrived at his moral principles, and how he is wrenched to realize that his youthful love for a young slave woman has smoldered for decades.  In short, it is a novel for grown-ups full of moral questions as well as drama.  It is also a wonderful complement to Alcott's classic.

 

There are two levels of invention here: Alcott's enthralling quartet of girls, and Brooks’ imagining of their father's life. Alcott apparently didn't think much of Little Women, but the book has delighted generations. Brooks' novel won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2006.  Both are engaging and "true" in the way that the best fiction is true and both are worth reading, no matter your age.     

 

Note: the image is of the cover of my much-read copy of Little Women 

Prophet Song: "the end of the world is always a local event.."

Prophet Song by Paul Lynch, the winner of the 2023 Booker Prize, is  billed in some quarters as a cautionary tale about what happens when a  country allows itself to be taken over by authoritarians.  It begins on a cold and rainy night when government agents come for Larry, a union leader and the husband of Eilish through whose eyes we see the drama.  From there things go from bad to worse.

But the book is far from being just another dystopic tale, ready to send shivers up the reader's spine but soon to be forgotten.  It is told with curious mixture of concrete detail--what you need when you're preparing for a siege, why the water from the kitchen faucet runs brown, the rapidity with which people put up or take down flags that are symbols of their allegiance--and poetic description.  It is written in lengthy  run-on sentences that both sweep the reader along, and make him or her gasp for breath at the audacity of seeing inside someone's head so clearly. The combination is mesmerizing.  

Lynch says he was  compelled to write Prophet Song by the Syria refugee crisis of 2015 and subsequent years.  Since he did not know enough about Syria he transposed his drama about people responding to civil war and an authoritarian state from there to Ireland, where he was born and where he still lives.  That he can make the transfer so believable is evidence of his skill as a storyteller but also sad testimony to how close to the surface disaster is in most places.

Ultimately, however, Lynch offers a sort of hope. He writes of Eilish as she tries to escape with her two surviving children. 

"... she looks at her infant son... and she can see that the world does not end, that it is a vanity to think the world will end during your lifetime in some sudden event, that what ends is your life and only your life, that what is sung by the prophets is but the same song sung across time...that the world is always ending over and over again in one place but not another and that the end of the world is always a local event..."

At the time I first read those words I was working on my book about the importance of collective and individual memory to the survival of our civilizations, Before We Forget: How Remembering Will Get Us Through the Next 75 Years.   Yes, I thought, the end may seem nigh, but we must continue as best we can.  Which is what Eilish does in the end, the very end.

A book to read and to think about.
 

Grey Bees and Snails: Two Novels about Ukraine

 

In Survival, Margaret Atwood's fascinating essay about Canada and its literature, she analyzed the relation between animals in a nation's fiction  and its views about itself.  The United States' animal stories were all about overcoming them, she pointed out, while English ones had cozy human-like beasts who ended up taking tea  together.  In Canadian writing, on the other hand, the animals were always victims which, she  argued, reflected Canadians' basic attitudes toward life.

Interesting idea, I remember thinking, but put it away, until recently when I've read two extremely good novels by Ukrainian writers, Grey Bees (2018) by Andrey Kurkov (translated into English by Boris Dralyuk) and Endling by Maria Reva (2025). Kurkov's hero is a beekeeper who wants little more than to allow his bees to do what they do best--collect pollen and make honey.  But he lives in territory that Russia invaded in 2014, and undertakes a long journey to safer, more clement country. It's  a quest and he encounters many adventures.  He and bees survive, which is saying something.

Reva is a Ukrainian-Canadian who immigrated with her family when she was a child.  Her novel starts off as a near-farce: three young women enroll themselves in a "beautiful Ukrainian bride" scheme, largely to make some money.  One of them also is a biologist bent on saving snails from extinction, and she's outfitted a van as a lab.  The other two are hoping to make contact with their militantly feminist mother who has disappeared, perhaps to avoid the consequences of her previous wild protests.  But they, and Reva, come up against the 2022 Russian incursion into Ukraine. The story first skitters to a false end, and then takes off in another direction involving kidnapping 13 would-be husbands for Ukrainian brides and snail match-making.  Quite funny, and very relevant.

All this to say: if you apply Atwood's scheme for comparing a people with its literature, particularly its animal stories, Ukraine comes across as a small being that survives great odds.  Makes sense, doesn't it?

Grey Bees won a slew of prizes when it came out, and--this just in!--Endling has won the 2026 Amazon.ca First Novel award.  Well deserved.    

Hope--and a Good Story--on the Other Side of the Great Derangement

 

  

The pre-historic village of  Bouldnor Cliff off the Isle of Wight is now completely submerged

Ian McEwan's What Can We Know was published just as I was putting the finishing touches on my Before We Forget: How Remembering Will Get Us Through the Next 75 Years. I borrowed McEwan's book from the library without really know what it was about: his novels are always good reads, and that was just what I needed at a time when I was struggling to get my own story told

 

It was a delight to jump into McEwan's story which rolled along briskly.  A young scholar 100 years from now is trying to resurrect a poem written in honour of a poet's wife in 2014. Doing so requires a fair amount of legwork on his part as well as ferry rides around the British Isles which now are even more  of an archipelago, due to rising sea levels.  The picture he paints of what is in effect our current reality is somewhat off, as are his imaginings of both the poem and the people in the poet's literary circle.  We learn the truth of the latter in the second part of the book (spoiler alert.) but it's a mystery solved satisfactorily.  We are similarly assured that the scholar and his equally-scholarly girl friend are likely to live sort-of happily ever after.

 

But the thing I liked most about the book is its underlying premise: life will go on even after "the great derangement" brought on by climate change and international conflict.  Obviously, surviving all this has not been easy and life is far from as pleasant as it is now for a lot of us.  But we--a general, all-encompassing we--will survive. Furthermore people will want to remember what happened in the past and  will have the tools to investigate it. McEwan postulates a Nigeria that has become the global power house and which has been able to salvage all our electronic records: a conceit that seems a little far-fetched now, but who knows?

 

What I do know is that my message in Before We Forget is exactly that: memory, collective and individual is what we will need to continue as civilizations.  Hopeful thoughts as the seas rise faster than ever, and stupid, destructive war rages on and on. 

Barometer Rising: a Book about the First World War That Has Echoes Today

 

Barometer Rising was Canadian writer Hugh MacLennan's first published novel. It juxtaposes a rather conventional love story--Penny thinks Neil was killed in the Great War, Neil wasn't but is hiding because he's been wrongly accused of cowardice, they spend most of the novel yearning for each other--with the all-too-real explosion of a ship carrying munitions in Halifax harbour in 1917.

A new Penguin edition of the book has a photo taken in the minutes following the collision of the French cargo ship SS Mont-Blanc with the Norwegian vessel SS Imo. The Mont-Blanc caught fire and its highly flamable payload exploded, creating the largest human-made blast until the A-bombs of World War II. But this does not occur until half way through the book, leaving one participant in a book discussion I recently led to express frustration at the slowness of the book's start.

MacLennan surely did this on purpose, because his aim was to write a story about Canada, its contribution to a war thousands of miles away, and its struggle to become a nation that is neither English nor American but something unique. As such, the characters' reflections are particularly pertinent today, when the country is trying to navigate its way through waters riled by Donald J. Trump. Prime Minister Mark Carney's several recent speeches about the importance of second-tier power working together can be read as direct descendants of the Canada MacLennan was writing about--a big country with much to give to the world. (Photo by Victor Magnus)

The Daughters of Shandong: Very Good Historical Fiction

 

istorical fiction sometimes has a bad rep. First of all, it can often get the facts wrong. Second, if it sticks too close to history it can be boring, lifeless, removed from the people who were making history.

That is why I approached Eve J. Chung's Daughters of Shandong with a certain amount of caution. It was suggested for a book club I belong to, and since I didn't have a better suggestion to defend, I went along with the group's choice. I'm glad I did because the book seems to skillfuly avoid both major problems of historical fiction.

The novel begins with Mao Ze-dong's Communist forces coming to power in Northern China, thrusting aside the Nationalists under Chaig kai-shek. The narratrice, Hai, is the oldest daughter in a wealthy land-owning family which the Communists want to punish. She, her mother and younger sisters are left behind when her father and other members flee. Girls don't matter, supposedly, and the excuse given for this act of cowardice is that they won't be bothered by the insurgents. Of course, that doesn't happen, Hai is nearly killed, becoming the scapegoat for the whole family. Only peasants who remember the kindness of Hai's mother help them, and so eventually they are able to flee.

What follows is a harrowing journey over two years (if I calculate correctly) that sees them go first to Qingdao on foot, and then to Hong Kong before ending up in Taiwan. I have not checked all the facts, but it appears that Chung did a great deal of research and avoids the trap of painting the Communists as devils and the Nationalists as the good guys. The truth is far more nuanced. What is portrayed as evil is th misogyny which favours men and denigrates women that pervaded China during this period.

A very good read, in short, and one from which the reader may learn a lot.

Back to Life: More Reviews Coming Up

 It's been three years since I posted on this blog.  Too many things going, a couple of books write, and other stuff kept me from writing about what I've been reading.  Now I've decided to reflect more on my reading and so I'm resurrecting the blog.  I hope it will amuse a few folks!