First book of 2019!

It's been many years since I've read something by Susan Orlean, so when I heard about her newest book, The Library Book, and learned that it was about the 1986 fire at the Los Angeles Public Library, I knew I had to become re-acquainted with her expert non-fiction writing.   As a lover of libraries, and a new resident of Los Angeles, this book seemed perfect for me to deepen my understanding of literary LA.  Since Orleans is also a book lover and an LA resident as well, her passion for the topic comes across very strongly.  

I learned a lot, indeed!  Orlean did an amazing job of weaving together the facts, the mysteries, the eccentrics, and the heartbreaks that all comprise the story of the largest library fire in United States history.  She interviews librarians and spends ample time at the library, thus becoming intimately familiar with the opportunities (providing information in a digital age, etc.), and challenges (how to make libraries welcoming to the homeless and the housed, etc.), typical issues libraries face (stolen books, etc.), a brief history of book burning, and a history of leadership at the LA Public Library.  

Facts I learned:

- The LA Public library has 73 branches
- More than one million books were burned in the fire, 400,000 were lost (value of $14 million)
- Damaged books were stored in ice lockers, then thawed, to varying degrees of success
- The library had been written up for fire code violations, but to this day it is still believed to have been an arson (arsonists have 99% chance of getting away with the crime)
- 700 new books arrive at the library every month
- Ray Bradbury couldn't afford to go to college so he spent 13 years at the library learning
- Book drops are often separated from the library because people used to put lit matches in them
- Dale Carnegie couldn't afford the $2 membership fee to libraries as a young child.  He committed the last third of his life to giving away his money, and built 1,700 libraries (six are in LA)
- There was, believe it or not, something called the Great Library War of Los Angeles
- A dead person who "looked like he didn't have a dime in the world" was found in the library with $20,000 cash in his pocket.  
- In the fjords of Norway, people receive books via a library boat.  

And, some quotes from Orleans that I can strongly relate to:  

...in the library I could have anything I wanted.

I wanted to have my books around me, forming a totem pole of the narratives I'd visited.  

Best Books of 2018

2018 was a year filled with major changes in my life, rendering me, for the first time in many years, without sufficient focus and interest in reading.  I went several months without reading a single book.  After finally feeling settled in my new city, I got a library card and started reading again.  It was a slow transition back, and I gave up on many books that didn't hold my interest.  But, these are the gems that have re-inspired me.  My top 12 or 2018 (in no particular order):

1. Strength to Love - Martin Luther King, Jr.
2. Exit West - Mosin Hamid
3. Where the Dead Sit Talking - Brandon Hobson
4. Washington Black - Esi Edugyan
5. Becoming - Michelle Obama
6. If Beale Street Could Talk - James Baldwin
7. A Place for Us - Fatima Farheen Mirza
8. Depth Takes a Holiday - Sandra Tsing Loh
9. Love is Blind - William Boyd
10. The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border - Francisco Cantu
11. American Prison - Shane Bauer
12. Ties - Domenico Starnone

Love, Love, Love

I'm a huge fan of William Boyd (Sweet Caress, Waiting for Sunrise, etc.), so when Love is Blind came out, I was very excited to get my hands on it!  This is one of those novels that captures you form the first page and you actually want to read it slower because you don't want it to end.  It's utterly engaging and gorgeously written, with elements of love, adventure, ambition, jealousy, and creativity.  It tells the life story of Brodie Moncur, a skilled piano tuner of little means from a Scottish village, who finds himself on a European adventure touring with a famous pianist during which time Brodie falls deeply in love with his employer's mistress.  Intrigue and entanglements ensue.  This was one of my absolute favorites of 2018!  

LOL

I was probably one of the last people in modern society to figure out what "LOL" stands for.  I'm a perpetually late adopter, and had a flip phone until mid-2018.  But, now that I grasp the concept, I can say wholeheartedly that Sandra Tsing Loh's Depth Takes a Holiday, which is a series of essays about her life in "lesser" Los Angeles, is one of the funniest books I have read in recent years.  LOL funny.  Her self-deprecating, italic-using, LA stereotype affirming, 90s essence emanating tales were not just hilarious, they were filled with sharp social observations.  So many passages had me in splits (do people still say that?!).  Here are some of my favorites:

I spent the entire late eighties shouldering about Los Angeles  in a Hyundai Excel without air-conditioning, not caring who knew.  I was a dodger of student lans, devoid of dental insurance, a buyer of Payless shoes...Oh my god!  How had this happened?  

In college, for instance, I insisted on dating these lean, athletic Sierra Club types with Ph. Ds in organic chemistry, their can-do optimism leavened with little gristly strokes of passive aggression.  Weekends became All About Rock Climbing.  Metal carabiners were always being thrust at one; I was constantly being belayed, like a stricken head of beef cattle, against my will.  One day I slipped and fell down one thousand feet of scree on my tailbone.  

"Bagging peaks" was the obsession of one bachelor.  We'' call him Stan, because today I think he's actually head of some kind of multimillion-dollar particle accelerator.  I imagine he has some frightened little family by now ("Dad says, "Let's all climb Half Dome without ropes!""), and his blood pressure is up to a thousand or his pulse is down to forty or whatever.  

Roger is suddenly drawing sixty thousand dollars a year - perhaps four times what he's ever seen in his fort-odd years.  Job description?  "Imagineer."  Now, many of us have brilliant, idiosyncratic, cantankerous friends who we think do not quite fit into this world - and certainly not into this thing called Entertainment Industry.   They chain-smoke their way into angry girlfriends' homes in Reseda, reading Tolstoy while everyone else goes off to their day jobs.  

When the flop sweat of this desperate town becomes just too nauseating, you drive up to Big Sur in a taut silence.  

LA in Letters

As a relative new resident of Los Angeles, I'm starting to read more books with this city as a backdrop.  As I am also a lover of letters, I was excited to pick up Dear Los Angeles, which is a compilation of letters and diary entries ranging from 1542 to 2018.  The book contains a sweeping array of entries, from both many folks unknown to me, as well as famous writers and thinkers such as MFK Fisher, Christopher Isherwood, Tennessee Williams, Susan Sontag, Eleanor Roosevelt, Anais Nin, and WEB Du Bois.  

One common denominator I noticed is that love it or hate it, throughout the years people have had very strong opinions about this sprawling city!  I also was intrigued to see LA compared to such far flung locales as Egypt, Guatemala, Tehran, and Athens.  

it was also rather frustrating, as some of the passages were extremely short and no context was provided, and many seemed to be written in Los Angeles but were not distinctly about it.  The arrangement in the book in chronological order by day of the year (but not by year) was also disorienting and unsatisfying.  

Here are some passages that caught my eye  Admittedly I only wrote down the author of the statement if it was someone I was familiar with.  

It is unjust that there should be such beauty in such a childish hellhole. (1935)

P.S. You ought to see my rectum!  (1929)

I must say that the profusion of little flower marts along the streets add greatly to the charm of the city.  - Eleanor Roosevelt (1946)

It takes an afternoon to get to Hollywood to buy paper and a typewriter ribbon.  - Anais Nin (1957)

After five, six days, there probably won't be a single Japanese remaining in Los Angeles. -  Aoki Hisa (1942)

This is the most horrible, unreal place in the world, on a dreary curve of the coast, I have rheumatism dreadfully here, and never felt so down-and-out anywhere... - Willa Cather (1929)

If I ever get away, I'll never come within a thousand miles of the place again. (1929)

I can't understand L.A. - It's totally given up its public spaces to the car.  The only places left for meaningful interaction are private areas. - Aaron Paley (1976)

...the expanses of concrete, driving areas, parking lots are incredibly discouraging for the pedestrian. - Aaron Paley (1976)

The town is a horror of ugliness, flat as your hand and crawling with cars.  Nobody dreams of walking anywhere and shops and houses are miles apart.  (1952)

Though I don't remember any earthquakes as a child, just the biting smog, the smog that bit my face and eyes and made me plead not to go downtown.  (2014)

The beauty of the region is so incomparable that even such a hardboiled European as myself can only surrender to it.  (1941)

L.A. has a tendency to drift south and west, as if it was a clean recuperated 3rd world city...Cairo.  (1981)

Los Angeles is no paradise.  The color line is there and simply drawn. - WEB Du Bois (1913)

Everything is Love

Strength to Love, by Martin Luther King, Jr., is an absolute must-read.  This is the first work I have read by MLK and I now plan to read every thing he has ever published.  Every sentence, every phrase is imbued with such gravitas, wisdom, and courage, and, the language is simply stunning.  Published in 1963, this is a collection of several of his sermons.  What I found most interesting was his utilization of theology to advocate for social justice.  Also, he used phrases like "military-industrial complex" and "psychosomatic" which I think of as phrases that may be more recently used in our parlance, so it is interesting that this language was utilized over 50 years ago.  Here are some of the passages that I found most striking:

Seldom are the humble self-assertive, or the self-assertive humble.  

There is an almost universal quest for easy answers and half-baked solutions.  Nothing pains some people more than having to think.  

Moreover, we must learn that passively to accept an unjust system is to cooperate with that system, and thereby to become a participant in its evil.

We are called to be people of conviction, not conformity; of moral nobility, not social respectability.  

Many people fear nothing more terribly than to take a position which stands out sharply and clearly from the prevailing opinion.  

In any cause that concerns the progress of mankind, put your faith in the nonconformist!  

Nonconformity is creative when it is controlled and directed by a transformed life and is constructive when it embraces a new mental outlook.  

[Noncomformity] is always costly and never comfortable.

Philanthropy is commendable, but it must not cause the philanthropist to overlook the circumstances of economic injustice which make philanthropy necessary.  

How often our lives are characterized by a high blood pressure of creeds and an anathema of deeds!  

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that.  Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.  

The dawn will come.  Disappointment, sorrow, and despair are born at midnight, but morning follows.  

If man were to lose his capacity to fear, he would be deprived of his capacity to grow, invent and create.  So in a sense fear is normal, necessary and creative.  

Courage, therefore, is the power of the mind to overcome fear.  

Hatred confuses life, love harmonizes it.  Hatred darkens life, love illuminates it.  

Oh, Klahoma!

I'm always amazed by the unexpected connections and pairings in the books I read.  I happened to pick up two novels that both take place in Oklahoma, and they were both intriguing page-turners in their own right.

Where the Dead Sit Talking, is Brian Hobson's debut novel, and was simply one of my absolute favorite books this year.  His eerie, perfectly paced, brooding, intimate coming-of-age tale is set in rural Oklahoma in the late 1980s.  Sequoyah and Rosemary are both Native American teenagers living in foster care with the Troutt family.  The two are drawn together and a mysterious air takes hold. This is an absolute must read!  

Wildlands, by Abby Geni, is a fascinating and disturbing tale about family, loyalty, and individuality.  The book tells the story of a family of kids left to fend for themselves after they are orphaned as a result of a tornado in their small town in Oklahoma.  Not only is the story riveting, but the writing is stunning as well.