The Library Book

After taking several months off, I finally made it back to my book club the month we read The Library Book. This one took me a while to get through. It was a little bit dry, but it ended up being interesting.

This book is about the central library in LA. It takes as it's entry point the time the library burned down and the arson investigation that happened after, digging in to the main suspect's life. The author also looks at the deeper history of the library - how it grew and changed under varying leadership through the decades. And she follows around the current staff to get a sense of how the library operates today. These three threads are all woven together in a way that got frustrating at times.

The various threads meant that this book wandered and jumped around a lot. It worked for me, because I was having trouble focusing at that point anyway. Each chapter is pretty self-contained, so I was able to follow those. But I had a hard time putting it all together and remembering what had come earlier in the book.

The thing I liked most were the chapter headers, a group of four books that had something to do with the chapter itself. It was fun to puzzle out how they related to the information I was getting, and it helped pull me through the book.

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