My book club is back in action … sort of. We kept putting off our next meeting due to the pandemic, but since it doesn’t look like things are going back to normal any time soon, we decided to just have our meeting over Zoom. I hope that means some of the people who have moved away can join us again.
Anyway, so I got a bunch of emails from my book club a while back with the list of books we’ll be reading next and this one by Susan Orlean was one of them. I had never heard of it, but the audiobook was readily available from my library, so I went ahead and listened to it.
First, let me just say that I really don’t recommend the audiobook. Orlean narrates it herself and she makes it as dry and uninteresting as most people think of non-fiction books as being. There are also several points at which she reads book titles in foreign languages and her pronunciation is so awful as to be painful to listen to. It’s not that the book is all that bad, is just that her narration is.
Now that I think about it, I really should have listened to this one at 1.5x speed. I don’t normally think to do that, but in this case I really wish I had.
The book is OK, but not great. It’s kind of about the burning of the Los Angeles public library back in 1986, but it jumps around so much, I feel like this book couldn’t quite figure out what it wanted to be about. It covers the stories of people who were in the library at the time it burned, the history of book burnings and library burnings all over the world, the history of the Los Angeles library, and Harry Peak, who was arrested for having started the fire in the library, but was later released when the charges were dropped. Orlean also inserts interviews and interactions with current librarians of the LA public library for no apparent reason.
The book spends a fair amount of time talking about Harry Peak’s life, both before and after the library burned down. Apparently he was extremely charismatic, but unreliable and a compulsive liar. He started out by telling his friends he had started the fire in the library, but he couldn’t keep his story straight, even when he was telling it to his friends. When police interviewed him, his story continued to change, and when he was on trial for having set the fire, his story continued to change yet again and again, making him seem guilty. Orlean herself said she went back and forth on whether he could be guilty.
Finally, Orlean talked to experts who disagreed about whether the fire was arson or an accident. Apparently the building had multiple fire code violations, and experts have disagreed for years about whether certain pieces of evidence really do indicate arson, or just that something already existed in those spots that fueled the fire. It’s nearly impossible to tell for sure, since almost all the evidence of having set a fire gets destroyed.
It’s definitely a fascinating subject worthy of investigation, I just wish Orlean had been better able to focus her efforts on the burning of the L.A. public library, rather than wandering off on tangents. Every time she brought up Harry Peak it felt jarring because she had spent so much time discussing other, seemingly unrelated things.