The Library of Lost Dollhouses - by Elise Hooper

Along with being unprepared for a test, and being naked in public, one of my recurring dreams is that of finding a secret room in my house. 

Hooper's book asks us to imagine finding a secret room in a library that holds secret dollhouses, each of which holds its own secrets. 

There are two timelines in this story: World War I Europe, and present day San Francisco. When Tildy Barrows, curator at Belva Curtis LeFarge Library and Museum, discovers a hidden room in the museum with two exceptionally decorated dollhouses created by artist Cora Hale it takes her on an unexpected journey that intersects with her own family history. 

The museum, along with its eccentric founder is loosely based on Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Just as Gardner left instructions to keep her art collection exactly as she left it, LeFarge likewise "left very strict provisions for how...the library was to be managed". Barrows is sure that this does NOT include digitizing the book collection to make room for more art. 

It turns out that Barrows was right. In fact LeFarge once insisted that raising a child in the Library was an exceptionally good idea. 

Libraries are the prefect place to grow up. Just think how smart she'll be.

Furthermore, the McCarthy-era heiress had this to say about a child being trouble in a library 

Any trouble a young person can find in a library is the best kind of trouble

And Hale, who knew LeFarge quite well, had this to say about libraries

Libraries are viewed as such solemn places-but why? Reading is magic. Think of the imagination and sense of adventure that readers employ every thine they crack open a book. There are few places filled with more magic than libraries, no about about it.

I am not sure what psychologists say about what the "secret room" dream means. I have always interpreted it to mean that I am not meeting my potential. But perhaps the dream is about revealing something I have kept hidden.  Just as every book has as many interpretations as there are readers, dreams are multi-layered and can mean different things to different dreamers. I think will need to think about my hidden room dreams a bit more.

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.

Theft by Finding: Diaries 1977-2002 - by David Sedaris

I went to my fourth David Sedaris event last Thursday in New Bedford (MA). The very next day James and I wrapped up our reading his latest book together. In the introduction to this work of diary entries he makes clear that this is only a "small fraction" of all that actually appears in the 156 volumes of his diaries. And that a different edit "from the same source material could make [him] appear nothing but evil, selfish, generous, or even...sensitive". What I saw, as a fan who has been following him since I first heard him on NPR in the early 1990s, was a person who was all these things, as well as a person who is a regular, if not frequent, user of libraries.

His introduction points out that the "early years, 1977-1983, were the bleakest" and "fueled by meth". I think it is also significant, then, that he mentions going to the library only infrequently during this time period. The word "library" appears three times during the first five years of entries, and only two of those were to discuss his own visits to the library, the other was as part of an overheard conversation at the IHOP - a place Sedaris appears to have frequented more often than the library - between two blind men one of whom talked about "the library for the blind and some good books he'd listened to lately." There is a definite change in the tone of the entries in 1984 when he moves to Chicago, and, I would add, a slight uptick in his frequency of discussing his use of the library, or reading of a library book.

In one of his first entries after moving to New York in 1990 he rambles about working out his "coffee situation". He is not crazy about either the IHOP which while they serve awful coffee (no surprise), they do give customers a whole pot, nor the Bagel Buffet which serves coffee in paper cups (blech) for .60 each. He wraps all this up with this truth: "Now I need a library card." There is no mention at all of the library in any of his 1991 entries, but he makes up for it by making two references (pun intended) in 1992 - one to lament that the library is closed on Lincoln's birthday. After this there is a concerning drop in the number of times the author uses the word library. I can only hope that this was simply an editing oversight, and that a different edit of this diaries would be in fact teeming discussions of all the great library books the author read, and how helpful and friendly the librarians were, but this edit has only mentions the word library twice after 1994 - one in 1998 (Paris) which was only to relate a story told to him about a friend of a friend, who, when he starting flipping through a magazine at a newsstand was told by the proprietor that they were not a "lending library".

I found the final mention of the word "library" in the last entry for 2001. It was poignant in its wistfulness. While contemplating what to wish for as he blew out the candles on his birthday cake Sedaris laments

When told to make a wish, I settled back in my chair, realizing I should have given it some prior thought. One option was an apartment in London, but in the end I wished for the opposite: the absence of things. Over the past few years I've fallen deeper into the luxury pit. I used to get pleasure from sitting at the pancake house with a new library book, but now I mainly buy things and work crossword puzzles.

Here's hoping that we see a resurgence of library use in the second volume.

If you haven't yet discovered David Sedaris, you really are missing some great humor. Find out more at http://www.davidsedarisbooks.com/