The Library Book

“They were a rivering [sic] flow of humanity, a gush, and they were looking for baby-name guides, and biographies of Charles Parnell, and maps of Indiana, and suggestions from a librarian for a novel that was romantic but not corny; they were picking up tax information and getting tutored in English and checking out movies and tracing their family history.” 

Orlean enumerates some of the many diverse reasons people visit libraries. Her use of “river” as a gerund contributes to the reader’s sense that a library is a place in which there is a ceaseless movement of life, in its many forms. People go to the library to get answers to the questions that arise in their lives, and they depend on the library to provide those answers.

“The reading of the book was a journey. There was no need for souvenirs.”

Orlean describes why she liked to borrow books from libraries during her childhood. Contrary to the preference for acquiring books that she developed while in college, Orlean initially only got books to read them. All that she sought to keep were the ideas they contained. This quote addresses the materialism involved in book possession and how children, some of the most avid readers, are oblivious to this and tend to be more focused on books as vehicles of learning and curiosity.

“I pictured Los Angeles as a radiant doughnut, rimmed by milky ocean and bristling mountains, with a big hole in the middle. I never went to the public library, never thought about the library, although I’m sure I assumed there was a public library, probably a main branch, probably downtown.”

Orlean is basing her vision of Los Angeles on the iconic doughnut that sits atop Randy’s Donuts—a famous local institution based in Inglewood. The doughnut is a convenient metaphor for the lack of attention that people paid to downtown Los Angeles in the mid-1980s, when the fire occurred, and the 1990s, when Orlean began visiting the city. 

“It wasn’t that time I stopped in the library. It was as if it were captured here, collected here, and in all libraries—and not only my time, my life, but all human time as well. In the library, time is dammed up—not just stopped but saved. The library is a gathering pool of narratives and of the people who come to find them. It is where we can glimpse immortality; in the library, we can live forever.”

Orlean considers the library, not as a place that holds old and, arguably, dead ideas, but instead as a place that protects ideas that have existed for as long as humans began writing. The library is a living repository of human thought, which is why it has been attacked by authoritarian rulers. 

“So the spell libraries once cast on me was renewed. Maybe it had never really been extinguished, although I had been away long enough that it was like visiting a country I’d loved but forgotten as my life went galloping by.”

Orlean stopped visiting libraries shortly after college, in favor of buying her own books. Visiting Los Angeles Central Library triggered a wave of nostalgia for her childhood love of libraries, which was once exciting to her. 

“On a library bookshelf, thought progresses in a way that is logical but also dumbfounding, mysterious, irresistible.”

Orlean refers obliquely to the Dewey decimal system, which is the method of cataloguing library books. There is a methodology to this system, but it is one that remains unclear to many library patrons. 

“In total, four hundred thousand books in Central Library were destroyed in the fire. An additional seven hundred thousand were badly damaged by either smoke or water or, in many cases, both. The number of books destroyed or spoiled was equal to the entirety of fifteen typical branch libraries. It was the greatest loss to any public library in the history of the United States.”

Orlean describes the magnitude of the fire’s destruction. The total number of books destroyed, or in danger of destruction, nearly comprised the library’s entire collection.

“They formed a human chain, passing the books hand over hand from one person to the next, through the smoky building and out the door. It was as if, in this urgent moment, the people of Los Angeles formed a living library. They created, for that short time, a system to protect and pass along shared knowledge, to save what we know for each other, which is what libraries do every day.”

Orlean describes the volunteer effort to rescue books from mold damage. The image that she recreates of a “human chain” formed to save books contrasts with the human chains that Germans formed to destroy books during the Nazi regime.

“The Boston Globe suggested the events in Chernobyl and in Los Angeles had a ‘ghostly symmetry’ because each raised the primal fear of a fire that was beyond control, along with our dread of menacing and unmanageable power.”

The disaster at Chernobyl consumed most of the world’s news media, leading to general ignorance about the Central Library fire. Both occurred around the same time and occurred as a result of mysterious circumstances. Both were the likely results of institutional neglect. 

“I could picture Harry Peak now because I saw him every day in the handsome overgroomed busboys who waited on me, and in the gym-trim extras I sometimes came across when there was filming in my neighborhood—I could recognize their anxious posing, as if each moment bristled with the potential to change their entire lives. I saw him in every person slumped over a laptop in a coffee shop, writing the role of a lifetime, and in the pretty girls wearing too much mascara and nail polish at the grocery store, just in case, just in case.”

Harry Peak epitomizes the ceaseless ambition that characterizes many of Los Angeles’s inhabitants. So many people arrive in the city hoping to become famous—or at least recognized. Many of them, like Harry, have a strong urge to put themselves on display.

“In truth, a library is as much a portal as it is a place—it is a transit point, a passage. Because Central Library is built around an intersecting pair of corridors, the building is open on every side, and you can cross through it from all directions. The ground floor has the same traffic pattern as Grand Central Terminal in Manhattan. Both places are animated by a hurrying flow that surges in and out of the doors all day long. You can bob along in that flow, unnoticed. The library is an easy place to be when you have no place you need to go and a desire to be invisible.”

Orlean captures the transitory nature of libraries. People frequently go in and out of its multiple entrances, as they would at a train station. It is a place that protects one’s anonymity and allows one to occupy the space for long periods of time undisturbed, which is why it is so appealing to the homeless.

“I have never been in a building as forlorn as this old library, with its bruised beauty, its loneliness. Abandoned buildings have a quaking, aching emptiness deeper than the emptiness of a building that has never been filled up. This building was full of what it was missing […] The kid who learned to read here; the student who wrote a term paper here; the bookworm who wandered happily through these shelves: all gone, gone, gone.”

Orlean and city librarian Szabo visited the Crenshaw branch library, which was long abandoned due to urban blight. Orlean imagines the life that the library once held and, more broadly, considers the intellectual vibrancy that the community has lost due to the library’s closure. 

“One of the few places homeless people are welcomed, given access to computers and the Internet, and permitted to dally all day (unless they act out) is a public library. Libraries have become a de facto community center for the homeless across the globe.”

Orlean frequently returns to this theme throughout the book. The public library is the only place outside of a homeless shelter where the homeless are not only welcomed but cared for. The library provides services for the homeless that the community wouldn’t otherwise provide and gives them access to media that they cannot afford to obtain independently.

“The idea of being forgotten is terrifying […] But if something you learn or observe or imagine can be set down and saved, and if you can see your life reflected in previous lives, and can imagine it reflected in subsequent ones, you can begin to discover order and harmony […] Writing a book, just like building a library, is an act of sheer defiance.”

Orlean returns to the notion that the library is one of the few places in which human beings can achieve immortality. Aside from this fulfillment of vanity, the library is also a place where people can feel less alone and realize that their ideas are a part of a confluence of ideas that has been shared for millennia. 

“Our minds and souls contain volumes inscribed by our experiences and emotions; each individual’s consciousness is a collection of memories we’ve cataloged and stored inside us, a private library of a life lived. It is something that no one else can entirely share, one that burns down and disappears when we die. But if you can take something from that internal collection and share it—with one person or with the larger world, on the page or in a story recited—it takes on a life of its own.”

Orlean describes the importance of writing books. Each book that one writes results from an attempt to connect one’s experience to those of others. She goes further by asserting that most of us contain experiences that could, if we wished, help us author books. This is a part of the appeal of the library—it contains not only all of the experiences that have been written but provides inspiration for those that have not yet been written.

“Taking books away from a culture is to take away its shared memory. It’s like taking away the ability to remember your dreams. Destroying a culture’s books is sentencing it to something worse than death: It is sentencing it to seem as if it never lived.” 

Orlean considers the historical atrocity of burning libraries. Destroying books equates to destroying a civilization. This is why Orlean calls it “worse than death,” because the destruction of books erases all evidence of a culture or civilization.

“Los Angeles seemed to always be moving toward the eternal future; it was a city that shed memories before they had a chance to stick. In 1996, no organized architectural preservation group existed in Los Angeles. To many people, the idea that there were historic buildings in spanking-new Los Angeles seemed like the punch line to a joke. But there were scores of meaningful buildings in the city.”

Los Angeles is a city that, in some ways, is a microcosm for the United States and its tendency to encourage ephemerality. While Los Angeles has a history, it also has a habit of propelling itself toward the newest trends. Los Angeles reveals the tension between the nation’s urge to preserve its cultural heritage and its need to pursue progress.

“For some reason, I felt a kind of affection for Harry Peak, for his blundering keenness and pure hunger for fame, but I could never find a moment when his stories stood still and I felt like I really knew who he was or what he believed.”

Orlean sympathized with the supposed villain in this story, despite her inability to answer all of her questions about his life. Peak was intentionally ambiguous, using his fantastic tales as a way to mask his true self, which, based on what Orlean knew about his upbringing, was probably a source of shame. Peak was, in some ways, typical of Hollywood: He was a product of make-believe.

“Every problem that society has, the library has, too, because the boundary between society and the library is porous; nothing good is kept out of the library, and nothing bad.”

Orlean considers the library as a microcosm for society. The library reflects the broader problems in the community, such as homelessness, but, arguably, does a better job of addressing such issues.

“Harry Peak, actor, always on the brink of being noticed but really always out of view, his image of himself getting a little more threadbare every day, his buoyant optimism unraveling, nothing happening quite as he’d imagined it and not at all like the version he bragged about to the people around him and even to himself.”

Orlean cleverly employs a lengthy sentence fragment to describe the tragedy of Peak’s life as a frustrated aspiring actor. He was a man whom people could describe in many ways but whose identity, especially to Orlean, always seemed incomplete.

“Starting a fire in a public building didn’t have the effervescence that his brags usually did. The fire wasn’t glamorous.”

Orlean wonders why Harry Peak ever took credit for setting the fire at Central Library. This is one of the instances in the book in which she tries to understand Peak’s character, though she never comes closer to discovering who he was or what his intentions were. Arguably, Peak took credit for the fire because, if he connected himself to it, he could get attention. Peak craved attention, whether it was positive or negative. 

“It would remain a story without an end, like a suspended chord in the last measure of a song—that singular, dissonant, open sound that makes you ache to hear something more.”

Orlean likens her sense of incompletion around Harry Peak’s story to an incomplete piece of music. She acknowledges that she will never know his entire story. This creates within her a perpetual sense of longing that she knows can never be fulfilled because Peak is now dead.

“A library is a good place to soften solitude; a place where you feel a part of a conversation that has gone on for hundreds and hundreds of years even when you’re all alone.”

Orlean posits that one can find company among a library’s myriad books. A library’s timelessness reassures one of a shared experience among past patrons.