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I've been on a "books about books" run lately, beginning with Syria's Secret Library , then Robert Caro's Working , and now I'm finishing the wonderful The Library Book by Susan Orlean. Orlean is a writer for The New Yorker , which generally means excellent nonfiction. Her book about the canine movie star Rin Tin Tin has been on my List since it was published in 2011. Her 1998 book The Orchid Thief is considered a modern classic. (I read The New Yorker story that led to the book, but have not yet read the book.) The Library Book , like most quality nonfiction, is many things. It's the story of a fire that destroyed much of Los Angeles' Central Library in 1986, and the mystery of who set the blaze, which was definitely arson. It's a history of libraries, and librarians, and a brief history of Los Angeles. It's also a short history of arson, and library fires, and probably a few other things as well. These many threads are intertwined with a ...

Fans of Robert Caro rejoiced when we learned that Caro, author of nonfiction histories, was writing a book about his writing process. When the book was published, I'm sure I wasn't the only one surprised by its brevity. At a slim 207 pages, Working: Researching, Interviewing, Writing is the equivalent of a post-it note for Caro, whose books are often described as tomes . I read Working over the course of a weekend, and I enjoyed every minute of it. Not only is the subject fascinating, but Caro's warm and genuine voice is truly a joy. If you read nonfiction and you enjoy history, and you haven't read Robert Caro , you must correct this terrible oversight. Caro's first book, The Power Broker , is considered one of the best nonfiction books of the 20th Century. It is a biography of Robert Moses , who was the most powerful man in the most powerful US city -- a man who was never elected to office and who many people, even many New Yorkers, may never have heard of. Mor...

Syria's Secret Library: Reading and Redemption in a Town Under Siege is a tribute to the power of books to heal, to offer refuge, and to nourish communities. It's also a tribute to the spirit of resistance to tyranny and oppression. In 2013, the Syrian town of Daraya was targeted by the country's dictator, Bashar al-Assad. Many residents managed to evacuate, but others stayed, determined to hold the historic and then-thriving town as a stronghold against the Assad regime. There, as their town was bombed and burned, a group of young men built an unlikely refuge: a library. The story of how these young Syrians salvaged and rescued books, often placing themselves in great danger to do so, is remarkable -- but even more remarkable is the community they built. Every book was catalogued, dated, and signed out when borrowed. The origin of every book was noted, so that its owners might reclaim it in happier times. There were book clubs and lectures. Some rebel fighters took books ...

I have so many cool stories about libraries and librarians, scattered through multiple email and social media accounts. Lucky for you, I wanted to gather them all in one place. Thanks to everyone who ever sent me one of these. * * * * * Librarians in laundromats! Community librarians are all about taking literacy to the people. In library jargon, we're trying to reach the non-users. If that sounds a bit drug-dealer-ish, it's not a bad analogy: come get a taste, then come back for more. The puns just write themselves: front-loading literacy , unhampered access... but the issue is deadly serious. You already know about food deserts. Well, there are book deserts , too. Neighbourhoods where libraries have been de-funded, bookstores are nonexistent, and families can't afford to buy books. In the US, great swaths of whole cities are book deserts. After all, there's no profit in bringing books to people who can't buy them. * * * * * Librarians as detectives! Meet the squa...

I have an abiding interest in prison librarianship, and try to learn about it wherever I can. Whenever the OLA Superconference features a session on prison libraries, I attend. I'm always pleased to see how popular and well attended these sessions are. Perhaps that should not surprise. In a sense, prison libraries epitomize librarian values -- the inherent value of reading, the power of self-education, the importance of finding the right reading material, the solace and companionship that reading can offer, the democratizing and liberating power of the library. And perhaps above all, the desire to bring resources to people who are marginalized and under-served. Whether I'll ever work as a prison librarian or volunteer in a prison library remains to be seen. Prison libraries have been decimated by austerity budgets, and few people advocate for them. In recent years a few narrative nonfiction books about prison libraries have been published. This is the first of a series of revie...

John McWhorter is changing my mind about language. And that is no easy thing to do. I'm a grammarphile. Word nerd, language junkie, spelling nut, stickler -- whatever you want to call it. I appreciate proper spelling and good grammar, and I cringe at all the bad grammar all around us. Apostrophe abuse drives me insane. Same for unnecessary quotation marks . Misspelled words on websites, signs, flyers, and official documents... don't get me started. Yet I also part ways with some of my fellow grammar-lovers. I believe grammar is important for writing, but not necessarily for speech -- and certainly not for casual speech. I hate seeing knowledge of grammar used to shame or exclude, or worse, as an excuse to not listen. Wmtc comment guidelines  warn readers not to correct another commenter's grammar or spelling. Even further, I believe it's perfectly all right to relax certain writing rules for casual writing. It's not necessary, in my view, to use awkward phrasing in...

A while back, wmtc had a discussion about the supposed controversy of the authorship of Shakespeare's plays, after I read the book Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare , by James Shapiro. Now a movie is out, telling a fictional, imaginative story of how Edward De Vere, Earl of Oxford, wrote the plays. For those of us who care about literature and history, this is frustrating, as much of the movie-going public is likely to receive the movie's story as fact. Here's a better take on the whole thing, by none other than Eric Idle. Or maybe Michael Palin. Who Wrote Shakespeare by Eric Idle* While it is perfectly obvious to everyone that Ben Jonson wrote all of Shakespeare’s plays, it is less known that Ben Jonson’s plays were written by a teen-age girl in Sunderland, who mysteriously disappeared, leaving no trace of her existence, which is clear proof that she wrote them. The plays of Marlowe were actually written by a chambermaid named Marlene, who faked her own orgasm, and t...

Roy Blount contemplates the original Winnie-the-Pooh I have one last snippet to share from our recent, brief trip to New York City. My friend NN, who writes this blog , surprised me with a wonderful gift. To celebrate its centennial, the New York Public Library has published a free book, Know the Past, Find the Future . A few thousand paper copies were distributed, and NN snagged one for me. (Lucky me!) The book is also available here, also free , in ebook form. Know the Past, Find the Future features people in all different fields writing about, and photographed with, their favourite item from the NYPL collection. As much as I enjoy "famous people choose a book" lists, this list takes the concept further, because the NYPL collection is so multifaceted and extensive. Maps, manuscripts, musical scores, first editions, photographs, letters - a massive amount of history lives in the NYPL vaults. Zadie Smith gazes at the first folio edition of Mr. William Shakespeare, Histories...

Nobody reads anymore, or nobody reads anything worth reading. At least that's what we're supposed to believe. These days everyone is too busy playing video games, watching YouTube and texting. Before that, everyone was too busy listening to loud music that corrupted their morals. Or was it watching TV that rotted their brains? One hundred years before that, the same moral degeneration took place in music halls and pool halls. And of course, when "they" do read - they being other people, for what "we" read is vastly superior - they read vampire stories or Harlequin romances or books recommended by - gasp! - a celebrity talk-show host. Oh, the humanity. The chicken-little view of The Decline of Culture is as old as culture itself. In the literature of every era, you can find a shelf full of cultural critics wringing their hands over the sorry state of literacy today, blaming technology, popular music, feminism, liberalism, alcohol, immigrants, what have you. ...

The second of the three " books on books " on my spring-summer reading list was Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare , by James Shapiro. Contested Will is not an examination of who wrote Shakespeare's plays and poems, but rather of the Shakespeare authorship controversy itself. Shapiro looks at why, about 230 years after the death of William Shakespeare, a belief arose that he was not, in fact, the author of the plays and poems that bear his name – and why that belief persists to this day, supported by a thriving cottage industry. Contested Will is not so much about what people think – although some of the claims are necessarily woven in – as why they think it. James Shapiro casts a keen, critical, and always skeptical eye at all claims both for and against Shakespeare's authorship. A Shakespeare scholar, he dislikes that the authorship question has been "walled off from serious study", as he puts it, within the scholarly community. In the excellent intro...

This is the first in a trio of "what i'm reading" posts falling under the general category of books about books, or reading about reading. After Roddy Doyle , these books are the top three books on my spring-summer to-read list. I started with The Case for Books: Past, Present and Future by Robert Darnton. I was introduced to the work of Robert Darnton in an elective course, "The History of Books and Printing," then encountered him again in my Foundations of Library and Information Science course. Darnton's long career is impressive indeed. He's one of the leading scholars in the field called History of the Book. He taught history at Princeton University for nearly 40 years, he's a past president of the American Historical Association, he's worked as a journalist and in publishing, has been a trustee of the New York Public Library, and is the founder of two innovative digital publishing programs, the Electronic Enlightenment and Gutenberg-e . ...