Wake Now in the Fire - by Jarrett Dapier & AJ Dungo

This very recently published graphic novel is a fictionalized account of real events. In 2013 Chicago Public School (CPS) removed all copies of Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis from classrooms. Once administrators determined that they didn't want the book to be used as part of the curriculum it was removed from classrooms, even as classes were being conducted. (A very similar situation occurred in the Tucson Unified School District (TUSD) around the same time.) The predictable refrain of "we're not banning books" from CPS Administration was evident. The CEO (yes CEO!) of the Chicago Public Schools at the time Barbara Byrd-Bennett claimed to know nothing about the removal of the books, and insisted that CPS is "not in the business of censorship". Turns out she was lying on both counts. Moreover, in 2015 Byrd-Bennett was convicted on bribery charges and spent time in federal prison.

Teachers, librarians, and students worked together to ensure that the book remained in the library, even as it was removed from classrooms. However, CPS was also working at the time to shut down most of the school libraries in the district.

The book doesn't shy away from an explanation that book banners come in both the red and blue variety. A student asks how such a thing can happen in bright blue Chicago. His teacher responds

Censorship is, unfortunately, something humans do. Humans in communist dictatorships, humans in right-wing theocracies, humans in red towns, blue towns...It's an instinct we seem to have for different reasons. 

A graphic novel about the banning of a graphic novel. I do like things that are meta. 

And I don't expect we will have to wait long before the book banners start challenging this one, too.

I am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter - by Erika L. Sanchez

Living in the shadow of her dead older sister (Olga) Julia Reyes navigates high school, family, first love, and friendships. Although she is indeed not perfect (but it turns out neither was Olga) she does at least understand the importance of libraries. 

She uses the old standby lie of "I'm going to the library" so she can instead interrogate Olga's best friend Angie about a hotel key and sexy underwear she found among Olga's things.

Julia gets into trouble quite often and by her own account "between the ages of thirteen to fifteen [she'd] spent about forty-five percent of [her] life grounded". She further explains that sometimes when she punished she isn't even allowed to go to the library "the cruelest kind of torture". She also claims she "can't get pregnant at the library" but she obviously has never worked in one and discovered the kinds of things that library workers all to often find indicating that perhaps someone did get pregnant.

Julia really does love books and dreams of becoming so rich someday that she has "a library so big that [she'll] need a ladder to reach all [her] books".

The Great Believers - by Rebekah Makkai

This is the third book by Makkai I've blogged about. The first (The Borrower) was the most librarian-centric, but also the most librarian-disparaging. While the present work, and The Hundred-Year House each only mention libraries a few times they are as places where research and scholarship is done. 

The storyline in The Great Believers alternates between two time periods the mid 1980s to early 1990s (during the AIDS crisis) and the year 2015. It follows the story of Fiona (whose brother Nico died of AIDS). It also tells of Nico's friends, all of whom were touched by the pandemic. One of the characters we learn the most about is Yale, whose job as a schmoozer at Northwestern University takes him to Door County, Wisconsin to meet with Mrs. Nora Lerner the widow of a Northwestern alum (and great-aunt to Nora and Nico). Nora Lerner wants to donate some original art pieces to the University gallery. Yale spends quite bit of time with her finding out about the works, which she obtained directly from the artists in Paris in the early twentieth century. As she describes what life was like in 1919 Paris Yale begins to empathize with her as she tells of all her friends dying either in the war, or from the Spanish flu and he recognizes how this parallels his own life.

Yale and his intern (Roman) use the Door County public library to make photocopies of some of Mrs. Lerner's documents. Most of the artists are well known in the art community except for one, Ranko Novak. Lerner stipulates that all the artwork must be displayed, or none of it can. In doing research about the artists Roman discovers a library book containing a "literal footnote" about Novak. 

This was published in 2018, before our current pandemic. It almost seemed surreal to read it in 2020.

The Most Fun We Ever Had - by Claire Lombardo

I borrowed this novel about Chicago from the library to read during my recent Thanksgiving trip to the Windy City. It tells the tale of the Sorenson family: Marilyn and David and their four daughters (Wendy, Violet, Liza, and Grace). There is quite a bit of drama between the sisters, and a fair bit of secrecy. But love wins out in the end.

Of course loving families use the library, and we know that the Sorenson's do so from the start. Even sleep-deprived, Marilyn knows to take her two-month old to the library. And like many new mothers she is sure that all the others are better at parenting than she is. She recounts this episode to her husband

I saw this woman at the library today with three kids and the youngest was about Wendy's age and she looked so - competent. And there I was wandering around the new fiction, not even awake, really, and I realized when I got home that I had too many buttons open on my shirt and you could see my whole bra, and I feel like I have this smell about me - do you smell it?

It's clear that trips to the library have become de rigueur by the time third child Liza is born. "The librarian asked me if I'd gotten myself pregnant again. She said she's been noticing that I'm gaining weight" Marilyn tells David by way of explaining that she wants to move from Iowa City back to Chicago, to her childhood home because she just doesn't get out much.

It's swell that the librarian knows the family so well, but really, everyone, never assume anyone is pregnant. And never ask. If someone wants you to know they will tell you.

Adult Violet clearly took her children to the library from a young age as well. She uses a story about a bear keeping a surprise party a secret that they'd heard at story hour as a simile for keeping their new-found half brother (whom Violet gave up for adoption fifteen years prior) a secret from the busybody Shady Oaks moms. Violet's reunion with her birth son (Jonah) is super awkward. She realizes how dull her life is when she drives him through her neighborhood and points out things like her children's school and the Little Free Library for which she helped fund raise. Jonah, who grew up mostly in foster care, also spent some time at Lathrop House (a group home). A place that could use some new iPads for the computer lab and "contemporary books for the library." 

When youngest daughter Grace realizes she is broke, crushing hard on Ben the barista, and, therefore, preoccupied with sex she makes use of the library to "surreptitiously" borrow D.H. Lawrence, Catulus, and Lolita.

Irish twins Wendy and Violet have a long-standing rivalry. Wendy is especially adept at pushing Violet's buttons and decides to give her grief about breastfeeding in front of Wendy - in her own home! "Oh my God, Violet, you have a guest." Wendy taunts. Violet "glanced down at the baby as though she were doing something workaday and normal, filling her gas tank or renewing her library books." Yes, that's because nursing your baby is as perfectly normal as putting gas in your car, or using the library. Don't even get me started. 

The Hundred-Year House - by Rebecca Makkai

I picked this book up at the Millicent Library earlier this month just browsing the shelves looking for a fun book to read during a long-weekend trip to NYC. This story is divided into three parts moving backward in time from 1999 to 1929 to 1900. The story of the haunted house (Laurelfield) and its occupants, is pieced together through its history as an artist colony, a compromising photograph, and mysterious files locked in the attic. 

There is heavy use of libraries by the characters in the first (most recent) part of the novel. In each successive part, as the story moves back through the century, they become less frequent. In the final section the only library mentioned in the one located at the estate. This is in steep contrast to the regular employment of all different kinds of libraries (public, school, academic, and archives) for a variety of uses by the characters who would live in the house 99 years later. 

Doug, a would-be academic (and son-in-law to Gracie, the owner of the house) is working on his dissertation about Edwin Parfitt (a poet who once stayed at the artist colony). Doug makes good use of his public library but is not always necessarily working on his dissertation. What his wife, Zee, doesn't know is that he is writing a book called Melissa Calls the Shots (no. 118 in the Friends for Life fiction series for pre-teen girls). Something else Zee doesn't know is that he had once used inter-library loan to request a book about her infamous family when he and Zee first became engaged. Zee had similarly done research on her own family at her boarding school library some years before.

I thought I might have a first for this blog, with a character who used inter-library loan, but it turns out that honor goes to one of my very early posts - 52 Loaves which I read in 2011. This is the first one since then, however. 

Doug is without a doubt the heaviest library user. Although it is one of his housemates, Miriam, who finds some dirt on the ghost of Laurelfield by reading her obituary on microfiche at the public library.

The first section of the book ends with a bonfire, built to "burn some bad art". Doug throws in three books from the Friends for Life series. Let me make one thing perfectly clear here - it is never okay to burn books, even crappy ones.

Commonwealth - by Ann Patchet

This year I am participating in the Baltimore County Public Library's #BWellRead Challenge which specifies one kind of book to read each month. I grew up in Baltimore County and I got my very first library card from BCPL in the 1970s, so although I now live and work in Massachusetts I am delighted to be a part of this endeavor. So far I've read Mona's Simpson's Anywhere But Here (January) and Beloved by Toni Morrison for February (no libraries in that one). March's challenge is to read a book with a one word title. I found Patchett's book on the Leisure Reading shelf of the Maxwell Library. I assumed it would be about Massachusetts, but it turns out the commonwealth in question is Virginia (FYI Kentucky and Pennsylvania are also commonwealths). And, like Irving Wallace's The Seven Minutes, the title of this book actually refers to a fictitious book of the same name.

This bit of meta-fiction about a blended family in the 1970s with six children is hardly the stuff of the Brady Bunch. Their parents' infidelity is what brings the Cousins and Keating children together and a disdain for their progenitors is what binds them. The novel follows the siblings through five decades. One of them, Franny, lands a job in the law library at the University of Chicago. This is what she refers to as her "real job". She also has an un-real job at the Palmer House restaurant as a cocktail waitress. The waitress job is the one that pays well while the pay at the library "is appalling".

As a child Franny was a heavy library user. She loved to read, forcing her father to make a comment that "It's a good thing there're going to be two lawyers in the family...Somebody's going to have to make the money to buy you all those books." To which Franny retorts "they're free...I check them out of the library."  Her sister Caroline makes a final condescending remark "Well, thank God for libraries".

Thank God, indeed.

Franny's stepbrother Albie finds that he can make good use of the public library as a free place to spend his evenings in order to give his sister and her family some privacy while he is sleeping on their couch. He always has a good book to read while he's there thanks to his job as a messenger which often has him delivering manuscripts to publishers. It is through this job that he finds himself with a copy of a novel that is clearly a thinly disguised story of his own family.

I found this work to be a true page-turner, and a perfect vacation read for my spring break trip to Florida. It was especially good for keeping my mind off of the airplane ride. My Florida friend saw that I was reading it and said that she had also recently read it for her book club and generally liked Ann Patchett's books. I will have to look for others.

The Night Bookmobile - by Audrey Niffnegger

The unnamed narrator in this surreal tale discovers a special mobile library that contains everything she has ever read - not just the books but also "periodicals and ephemera-cereal boxes and such". "It's a very complete collection" the enigmatic librarian, Mr. Openshaw, tells her. She spends a few hours with her books, but as the sun rises Mr. Openshaw shoos her out of the shabby Winnebago that serves as her literary memory explaining that the library's hours are "dusk to dawn". The narrator's obsession with finding the bookmobile again leads to several major life changes for her - including becoming a librarian herself.

A story about the love of books, and reading, and how books hold and become our memories.

Orange is the New Black - by Piper Kerman

I've been intending to read Kerman's memoir ever since the debut of the Netflix series of the same name in premiered in 2013. After recently watching the fifth season, I finally got over to my public library and checked the book out. Much less edgy than the television show, Kerman's book is, nevertheless, a quick and fascinating read.

While the television show's characters Poussey (Samira Wiley) and Taystee (Danielle Brooks) might have one believe that the prison library is a hub of activity, it was in fact barely mentioned in the book. Most of Kerman's reading materials were sent to her by friends and family, so much so that she ended up with her own personal library, which she was glad to share with others. When she left the federal penitentiary in Danbury, Connecticut she donated all of her books to the prison library. She knows her books are being used when a year after her release she receives a letter from Danbury

Formal and stilted, it was from Rosemarie, and folded into it were two photographs of my grandmother. My cousin had sent them to me in prison...Rosemarie wrote that she hoped I was doing well on the outs, and that she had found these photos in a book in the library and recognized who it was. 

Photographs are among the more innocuous things found in returned library books. For some real tales from the stacks see this post from BookRiot, and this one from BuzzFeed.

Another fellow inmate, Levy, upon being released was interviewed by the Hartford Courant newspaper and described her six-month sentence as a "holiday" with a "wide range of classes" as well as "two libraries with a wide array of books and magazines, including Town and Country and People". All of this, of course was a surprise to her fellow inmates who listened to her complain and cry every day of her incarceration.

In the book's Afterword Kerman (now serving on the board of the Women's Prison Association) points out that the United States has the world's biggest prison population with 25% of the wold's prisoners, but only 5% of the world's population. Low level offenders make up a huge proportion of these inmates. She further explains

Most of the women I know from prison have lived lives that were missing opportunities many of us take for granted. It sometimes seems that we have built revolving doors between our poorest communities and correctional facilities, and created perverse financial incentives to keep those prisons full, at taxpayers' expense. America has invested heavily in prison, while the public institutions that actually prevent crime and strengthen communities - schools, hospitals, libraries, museums, community centers - go without.

Sing it, Sister!

Will Grayson, Will Grayson - by John Green & David Levithan

I've read a few of John Green's books, at the recommendations of my daughter and niece (who is especially big fan) and while I also like his books, and find his characters to be funny, witty, and smart they just don't seem to use the library that much. You won't find The Fault in Our Stars reviewed on this blog at all for as much the characters in that book liked to read, they never once mentioned going to the library. And while there was minimal use of the library in Looking for Alaska  it was hardly as a place of intellectual fulfillment. Will Grayson, Will Grayson (titled for the two characters in the book with the same name) follows the same pattern of slim library pickin's as the others I've read. The one and only place I've marked the word "library" is in a passage in which a disgruntled member of the math team, upset that one of the Will Graysons in bailing on the "mathletic" competition, "picks up his (lunch) tray, murmurs something about library fines, and  leaves the table." Good to know that the library will always provide an excuse for leaving a difficult situation.

Divergent-by Veronica Roth

On one of my rare visits to a movie theater last year I saw a trailer for the movie Divergent. It looked like a movie right up my cup of tea with a strong female lead in a dystopian society. And, it turns out, it was based on a book. I always like to read a book before I see a movie based on it, so I read this one in anticipation of the movie's opening later this month.

The setting for this work is some unspecified future time: Chicago, Illinois. Each member of society takes a test at age 16 to determine which faction of society they belong in. There are five factions: Abnegation (the selfless); Amity (the peaceful); Candor (the honest); Dauntless (the brave); and Erudite (the intellectual). Once a person chooses their faction it is theirs for life. There is no crossing over. Those who do not easily fall into one of the factions are called "Divergent" and are considered a danger to the society. The story follows Divergent Beatrice (later called simply "Tris") as she tries to hide from the powers that be.

Overall the story was pretty good and I read it quickly, but I must say I was put off by the fact that the Erudite were the villans in this story, and the only mention of a library was as the headquarters of the Erudite. It all seemed like just more anti-intellectual rhetoric to me. And while not every book I've read about libraries necessarily exalts them, reading about a library as the temple of evil distracted me from enjoying the rest of the book.

I do see the appeal of this work. A novel for young adults, I imagine that most who read it will want to identify with the "divergents", those who do not easily fit into one category - those who can be selfless, and peaceful, and honest, and brave, and smart. I don't think I will rush out to the theater to see the movie though. Perhaps I will watch it when it comes out on Netflix. I am on the fence about reading the rest of the trilogy.

The Borrower - by Rebecca Makkai

An unlikely "buddy" story, The Borrower tells of Lucy Hull, an "accidental" librarian, who "accidently" kidnaps ten-year old Ian Drake. Ian had run away from home and found refuge in the beloved stacks of the Hannibal, Missouri Public Library. Lucy and Ian wind up taking a road trip across the mid-west and then into New England in order to give him a break from his parents and their insistence that he attend classes with "Pastor Bob", who "helps" young boys who might be questioning their sexuality.

Lucy had previously been told by Ian's mother not to let him check out books about witchcraft, magic, the occult or anything by "Roald Dahl, Lois Lowry, Harry Potter, and similar authors". Lucy doesn't bother to point out that Harry Potter is not an author.

Although the main character is a librarian I am hard pressed to give it either a "Gold Star" or "A list" rating (see my "A Word about the Labels" note to the right). Lucy mentions several times that she doesn't really like her job except for Ian and her co-worker, Rocky. She never intended to be a librarian; it is simply what she fell in to after she graduated. Most people would not be able to get a job with the title "librarian" with those kind of non-credentials, but the library "needed a children's librarian fast after the old one was diagnosed with stage three breast cancer." And while Lucy does recognize this, she continues to make efforts not to identify herself with this boring profession, and disparage it when she can, even in her daydreams. After reading her alumnae magazine and finding out what exciting things her former classmates were doing, she imagines what it might say about her:

Lucy Hull, class of '02 courageously checked out The Pushcart War to a ten-year-old patron today, despite the preponderance therein of peashooters and the fact that the book does not in any way contain "the breath of God."
"It really wasn't a choice", said the 26-year old Hull, who has done very little with her adult life besides stamping books, re-shelving books, and reading books with funny voices. "It's basically illegal to deny a book to someone with a library card. I'm not quite sure why you're interviewing me."

Who does she think is responsible for lobbying for laws that allow anyone to check out whatever they want? I am happy to pay my American Library Association dues to help pay for such things.

Lucy berates herself on several occasions for her wardrobe. "I hated that I'd started looking like a librarian" she pouts after her co-worker Rocky points out that she is wearing a cardigan. And she has this to say about the library fundraiser she attends:

Once a year all the librarians in the county wedged themselves into high heels, tried to pull the cat hair off their sweaters with masking tapes, and smeared their lips with an awful tomato red that had gone stale in its tube, all to convince the benefit set of the greater Hannibal region that libraries do better with chairs and books and money.

I did laugh when she mentioned buying a dress at L.L. Bean that looked like something a librarian would wear. My co-workers and I will all admit to having a preponderance of clothing from that venerable retailer in Maine, along with good ol' Lands' End, of course.

When Tim her cool, gay actor landlord doesn't invite her to join in his reindeer games, she laments that he'd clearly "mistaken [her] for a librarian". He discovers he is wrong about this assessment many months later when he assists her with a scheme to communicate with young Ian without his parents knowing. "This is amazing...It's just like, amazing. I mean, we thought you were this mild-mannered librarian and everything. And there you are, all vigilante and shit..." says he.  Of course only a "fake" librarian would do these things. We real librarians would never stick our necks out for anything.

Lucy briefly dates a musician who tells her he "was a librarian once...as an undergrad, [whose] main job was to erase pencil marks from the last season's orchestra scores". Lucy, who is not a real librarian herself, doesn't bother to point out that there is a big difference between being a librarian, and working as a student employee in a library building. The irony of her dating a musician does not escape her, though. She points out that she'd "seen The Music Man enough times as a child to be wary of smiling musicians."

Additionally she mentions one of my favorite library movie scene from It's a Wonderful Life.

And there she runs in thick glasses, clutching books to her useless breasts. This nightmare Mary Bailey has ruined her eyesight from long hours reading alone in the dark.

 How strange, that this one profession should be so associated with loneliness, virginity, female desperation. The librarian with the turtleneck sweater. She's never left her hometown. She sits at the circulation desk and dreams of love.

 Not really so strange when we have Makkai still using the same stereotypes in the 21st century.

Even young Ian understands that librarians are really just a bunch of frustrated old maids. He suggests to Lucy that the library is haunted by the "ghosts of dead librarians. Not like [Lucy], but like old ladies who never got married."

The two visit a public library in small-town Vermont where they talk to a the reference librarian "blank-faced woman with dull hair" who answered her questions in a rather bored manner. They also lie to the young circulation clerk in order to check out some books without a library card.

Ultimately, Lucy gives up her life in Hannibal, Missouri for a job in Chicago at the college library where "the borrowers already know what they're looking for" and all she does in stamp out books. Really? As a college librarian I can assure readers of this blog that not all of our users know what they want already. We have enough trouble convincing people our jobs are still relevant without the Rebecca Makkai's of the world making up this kind of stuff. I mean, I've been known to make some profession-deprecating remarks myself, but sheesh!