Book of the Year - 2018

Los Angeles Public Library

The Goodhue Building

1935

It wasn't difficult to make my choice for Book of the Year: The Library Book by Susan Orlean. It is one that recently came into my life and comes with a pretty good story as to how I happened to acquire it. I wrote about the surprising circumstances of receiving the book here.

Now that I have read it, I have been recommending The Library Book to just about everyone I talk with. It is part mystery, part history, part biography, and always a tribute to libraries and books. It offers brief lessons in architecture, city planning, social issues, firefighting, arson investigations, and technology.

The idea for the book came about when Ms. Orlean learned of the fire in 1986 that practically destroyed the Los Angeles Public Library. Was the fire caused by accident or was it caused by "an open flame, held by a human hand"?

No matter how it began, before it ended, the fire had raged for seven hours killing 400,000 books and injuring 700,000 more. It was seven years before the doors of the rescued and renovated Goodhue Building opened again to patrons.

Ms. Orlean cannot write a stodgy sentence. Her description of the path of the fire as it roamed through the stacks consuming book after book and shelf after shelf left me with tears in my eyes. Her attempts to experience what it felt like to burn a book (fittingly, a copy of Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451) was as traumatizing for me as it was for her. 

Here are fascinating facts about how libraries work, their history, and thoughts on their future. Ms. Orlean offers the personality-filled lineage of the heads of the Los Angeles Public Library (founded in 1872). She relates her many conversations with current staff members, department heads, and even the security guards who make their daily rounds.  

She writes of mobile libraries around the world including ones powered by donkey, burro, boat, train, or elephant. There is also a nod to the 1936 establishment of the Works Progress Administration's Pack Horse Librarians who for years served the small communities in the mountains of Kentucky, my home state.

She recalls with great fondness trips she made as a child with her mother to her local library. She explores the future of libraries as not just storehouses of material - not only books, but maps, music, art, genealogical sources, and films - but as information and knowledge centers. Town squares, if you will, where people meet and mingle, read and relax.

There are so many thoughtful features in the construction of The Library Book - from its cover that feels like cloth to the card catalog titles that open each chapter to the end papers - but, I won't spoil that surprise.

If you haven't yet bought yourself a Christmas present, I guarantee you won't go wrong treating yourself to The Library Book. This is definitely one you will want for your own library.

Belles-Lettres: Brilliant, Blue-Ribbon Books 2013

Biggest Surprise of the Year -  I Loved This Book! 

So Big by Edna Ferber; published in 1924

Top Three Non-Fiction Books That Were Entire Educations in Themselves: 

At Home by Bill Bryson; How to Live, Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer by Sarah Bakewell; The Island of Lost Maps by Miles Harvey

Top Three Fiction Books (not mysteries): 

The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster; Equilateral by Ken Kalfus; Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury.

Author Most Read: 

Donald Westlake - Six of his Dortmunder capers

Most Delightful Reread: 

Counting My Chickens... by The Duchess of Devonshire

Brothers I Would Most Like to Meet: 

Reggie and Nigel Heath of The Baker Street Letters, The Brothers of Baker Street, and The Baker Street Translation by Michael Robertson

Best Foreign Location: 

Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen and West With the Night by Beryl Markham

Most Laugh-Out-Loud Dysfunctional Family: 

The Spellman Files and The Curse of the Spellmans by Lisa Lutz

Dreamiest Tale: 

The Frozen Thames by Helen Humphreys

Best Road Trip: 

The Lost Continent - Travels in Small-Town America by Bill Bryson

Mystery Writer I Am So Glad I Found: 

Peter Lovesey - The Last Detective, Diamond Solitaire, The Summons, and Bloodhounds. 

As If I Needed More Reasons Not To Go On A Cruise: 

A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again by David Foster Wallace.

Proof That The South Shall Rise Again: 

Mama Makes Up Her Mind by Bailey White.

Authors I Have Met and Their Books I Read This Year: 

Duffy Brown (Killer in Crinolines), William Zinsser (The Writer Who Stayed), and George S. McGovern (Abraham Lincoln)

Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury

Dandelion Wine, Ray Bradbury's tale of Summer 1928 in small Green Town, Illinois, is a wonder. The words fly about the pages as sparkly as the fireflies that light up the summer nights. 

The story is full of an astonishing collection of characters. Some we meet only once; some come off their front porch swings to visit again and again. 

The main character, twelve-year-old Doug Spaulding, discovers this summer that he is alive. He also discovers that nothing lasts forever - not friendship, nor machines, nor loved ones, and especially not summer. 

Doug attempts to capture the events and lessons of the summer on paper, writing on his nickel tablet with a yellow Ticonderoga pencil. One section is titled Rites and Ceremonies, a record of all the things that happen over and over again. The other section is titled Discoveries and Revelations, a record of ideas that occur to him in response to that summer's happenings.

The bottles of this year's crop of dandelion wine in his grandfather's cellar store in liquid form the good things of summer: the great day Doug got his new sneakers, the day he and his younger brother Tom (who is quite the philosopher) rescued the Tarot Witch, times spent with Colonel Freeleigh listening to his memorable stories. 

But the bottles also contain the sorrowful day his best friend moved away and the day the sisters Miss Fern and Miss Roberts put away the Green Machine in the garage forever. And the day the town's trolley stopped running on its silver tracks. And the night the Lonely One killed yet another young woman. 

I could go on pulling out scenes and characters and events, but you really need to experience the book for yourself. And it is an experience. It is quite a dazzling tale told with affection and humor and heartbreak...and a perfect summer read. 

Fireflies and screen doors

I finally got my hands on a copy of  Ray Bradbury's Dandelion Wine as a good book to savor this summer. What a treat. I am only half-way through, but I can tell you that it makes me want to be a 12-year-old boy living in a small town in the summer of 1928. 

And what a change that would be!

The tale is really a series of short stories (or so it seems) and they are so beautifully and dreamily evocative of summer's fireflies and white clouds, grasshoppers and games on the lawn, wild blackberries and the sound of slamming screen doors.

Here is, to me, a breathtaking introduction to John Huff, the best friend of the main character Douglas Spaulding:

The facts about John Huff, aged twelve, are simple and soon stated. He could pathfind more trails than any Choctaw or Cherokee since time began, could leap from the sky like a chimpanzee from a vine, could live underwater two minutes and slide fifty yards downstream from where you last saw him. The baseballs you pitched him he hit in the apple trees, knocking down harvests. He could jump six-foot orchard walls, swing up branches faster and come down, fat with peaches, quicker than anyone else in the gang. He ran laughing. He sat easy. He was not a bully. He was kind. His hair was dark and curly and his teeth were white as cream. He remembered the words to all the cowboy songs and would teach you if you asked. He knew the names of all the wild flowers and when the moon would rise and set and when the tides came in or out. He was, in fact, the only god living in the whole of Green Town, Illinois, during the twentieth century that Douglas Spaulding knew of. 

Dandelion Wine Anyone?

Speaking of June and summer, I am reminded of the novel Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury. The stories featuring a 12-year-old boy and his family and friends take place during one summer in the 1920s in a small Illinois town. I read it so long ago I can only remember that the boy's grandmother made dandelion wine and that Mr. Bradbury evoked summer so very well I could almost see the fireflies glittering in the moist night air.

This is one of the novels I want to reread this summer. I am making a Summer Reading List for myself since I have no schoolmarms to make suggestions for me.

Summer is for children and I plan on experiencing the joy of the season through the eyes of a couple of the fictional characters I have forgotten about.

Dandelion Wine seems an excellent place to begin.

So long, Ray.

Ray Bradbury
1920-2012

I always thought of Ray Bradbury as being quite a character. I enjoyed reading Something Wicked This Way Comes and Dandelion Wine. Also, the prose in The Martian Chronicles took my breath away. What a fertile, creative mind.

And then of course, Fahrenheit 451. What a nightmare tale for a lover of books. Just the idea of putting out there the temperature at which books burn makes me shudder. One should never have to know that.

The ending of the movie starring the lovely Julie Christie, with people walking about reciting over and over the book they had memorized, is one that I often think of. I wonder which book I would choose to commit to memory? What book would I want to live with every day?

I never have been able to decide.

What would you choose?