THE LIBRARY BOOK by Susan Orlean

We have TV dramas and sitcoms based around cafes, pubs, hospitals, medical centres, schools, but never around a library - perceived fusty dusty place of pointy head fuddy  duddy women and eccentric badly dressed men. Well, let me tell you, a library would be a fantastic place to set a TV series, because like the public hospital emergency room, it is perhaps one of the greatest levellers in our society, where everyone is on the same page (ha ha).

This book is amazing, I can't begin to praise it enough. The writer is a staff writer for the The New Yorker and has written for many other prestigious magazines. She is also a highly regarded author of other non fiction, her most well known book being The Orchid Thief. Her writings show a deep connection with her subject, acute insight and that finely honed journalistic ability to write about it very well.. None more so than in this wide ranging and dazzling adoration of the institution we call the library.

The focus is entirely on a huge fire that started in the Los Angeles public library in 1986 destroying nearly half a million books, and damaging around 700,000 others, as well as historical photographs, magazine collections, archival material and much more. Was it arson - much of the book is a whodunnit for the arsonist, an unusual young man called Harry Peak whom you couldn't make up if you tried. There is a fascinating history of how the Los Angeles public library building and entity came to be with plenty about the development of LA itself,  and the equally fascinating early librarians and staff. The present staff are no less interesting either - past and present staff bringing an enormous love and passion for the work they do. There is much about the history of libraries in general, their purpose in our lives, the desecration of books by burning as a way to control a population,  how libraries are the hub for a community and not just a place to go to on a wet day, the importance to homeless people, the lonely, the poor to have a place of solace and reading to go to.

To the author, libraries and librarians are among the basic cogs that our society and humanity runs on. For many of us the library has been a place we have been going to since childhood, where we found freedom to browse books, choose books, have our own library card, for ourselves, not to please our parents or teachers, just to please our young self. This book is a homage and tribute to the place of the library in our world, as well as being a damn fine suspense filled detective story.