"The number of books destroyed... is so enormous--in the billions--that I sometimes find it hard to believe there are any books left in the world."
"The Library Book" reaffirmed my strong belief that books have a tendency to find us at the right moment. I've had this on my bookshelf since last Christmas and in an attempt to finally catch up on my owned-TBR list (which consists of over 30 books), I picked this one up sort of on a whim, which also happened to be the week I started applying to masters programs in library science.
I rarely read nonfiction, but I truly couldn't put this one down. Susan Orlean is a beautiful storyteller and every one of her sentences pulls on a heart string. She describes people, real people so elegantly, you feel empathetic towards all of them. This book is about a disastrous library fire in 1986, but it's more about the pricelessness of libraries, librarians, and literature. Access to knowledge is something we have to fight for and librarians are the ones fighting, diversifying and modernizing libraries so more people have a free, safe, dry place to explore and live.