Best Books About Libraries!

This week is National Library Week…

In honor of the occasion, we offer a list of our favorite books about libraries (fiction and non-fiction)!

We encourage you to check these books out from your local library…

 

[easyazon_image align=”left” height=”333″ identifier=”0385354304″ locale=”US” src=”https://englewoodreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/51IgxAo45yL.jpg” tag=”douloschristo-20″ width=”224″] The Strange Library: A Novel

by Haruki Murakami 

[ [easyazon_link identifier=”0385354304″ locale=”US” tag=”douloschristo-20″]Amazon[/easyazon_link] ]

From internationally acclaimed author Haruki Murakami—a fantastical illustrated short novel about a boy imprisoned in a nightmarish library.
 
Opening the flaps on this unique little book, readers will find themselves immersed in the strange world of best-selling Haruki Murakami’s wild imagination. The story of a lonely boy, a mysterious girl, and a tormented sheep man plotting their escape from a nightmarish library, the book is like nothing else Murakami has written. Designed by Chip Kidd and fully illustrated, in full color, throughout, this small format, 96 page volume is a treat for book lovers of all ages.

 

[easyazon_image align=”left” height=”333″ identifier=”1476777411″ locale=”US” src=”https://englewoodreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/51xUoiXDIEL.jpg” tag=”douloschristo-20″ width=”218″]The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu: And Their Race to Save the World’s Most Precious Manuscripts

by Joshua Hammer

[ [easyazon_link identifier=”1476777411″ locale=”US” tag=”douloschristo-20″]Amazon[/easyazon_link] ]

To save ancient Arabic texts from Al Qaeda, a band of librarians pulls off a brazen heist worthy of Ocean’s Eleven in this “fast-paced narrative that is…part intellectual history, part geopolitical tract, and part out-and-out thriller” (The Washington Post).

In the 1980s, a young adventurer and collector for a government library, Abdel Kader Haidara, journeyed across the Sahara Desert and along the Niger River, tracking down and salvaging tens of thousands of ancient Islamic and secular manuscripts that were crumbling in the trunks of desert shepherds. His goal: to preserve this crucial part of the world’s patrimony in a gorgeous library. But then Al Qaeda showed up at the door.

“Part history, part scholarly adventure story, and part journalist survey….Joshua Hammer writes with verve and expertise” (The New York Times Book Review) about how Haidara, a mild-mannered archivist from the legendary city of Timbuktu, became one of the world’s greatest smugglers by saving the texts from sure destruction. With bravery and patience, Haidara organized a dangerous operation to sneak all 350,000 volumes out of the city to the safety of southern Mali. His heroic heist “has all the elements of a classic adventure novel” (The Seattle Times), and is a reminder that ordinary citizens often do the most to protect the beauty of their culture. His the story is one of a man who, through extreme circumstances, discovered his higher calling and was changed forever by it.

 

[easyazon_image align=”left” height=”333″ identifier=”0465042996″ locale=”US” src=”https://englewoodreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/41IWc6JH5gL.jpg” tag=”douloschristo-20″ width=”222″]BiblioTech: Why Libraries Matter More Than Ever in the Age of Google

by John Palfrey

[ [easyazon_link identifier=”0465042996″ locale=”US” tag=”douloschristo-20″]Amazon[/easyazon_link] ]

Libraries today are more important than ever. More than just book repositories, libraries can become bulwarks against some of the most crucial challenges of our age: unequal access to education, jobs, and information.

In BiblioTech, educator and technology expert John Palfrey argues that anyone seeking to participate in the 21st century needs to understand how to find and use the vast stores of information available online. And libraries, which play a crucial role in making these skills and information available, are at risk. In order to survive our rapidly modernizing world and dwindling government funding, libraries must make the transition to a digital future as soon as possible—by digitizing print material and ensuring that born-digital material is publicly available online.

Not all of these changes will be easy for libraries to implement. But as Palfrey boldly argues, these modifications are vital if we hope to save libraries and, through them, the American democratic ideal.

 

 

[easyazon_image align=”left” height=”333″ identifier=”0143115006″ locale=”US” src=”https://englewoodreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/51gB6GNASL.jpg” tag=”douloschristo-20″ width=”217″] People of the Book: A Novel

by Geraldine Brooks

[ [easyazon_link identifier=”0143115006″ locale=”US” tag=”douloschristo-20″]Amazon[/easyazon_link] ]

The bestselling novel that follows a rare manuscript through centuries of exile and war, from the author of The Secret Chord and of March, winner of the Pulitzer Prize.  

Inspired by a true story, People of the Book is a novel of sweeping historical grandeur and intimate emotional intensity by an acclaimed and beloved author. Called “a tour de force”by the San Francisco Chronicle, this ambitious, electrifying work traces the harrowing journey of the famed Sarajevo Haggadah, a beautifully illuminated Hebrew manuscript created in fifteenth-century Spain. When it falls to Hanna Heath, an Australian rare-book expert, to conserve this priceless work, the series of tiny artifacts she discovers in its ancient binding-an insect wing fragment, wine stains, salt crystals, a white hair-only begin to unlock its deep mysteries and unexpectedly plunges Hanna into the intrigues of fine art forgers and ultra-nationalist fanatics.

 

[easyazon_image align=”left” height=”333″ identifier=”022609281X” locale=”US” src=”https://englewoodreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/61qh1zxF6L.jpg” tag=”douloschristo-20″ width=”269″]The Library: A World History

by James W. P. Campbell  (Author),
Photographs by Will Pryce 

[ [easyazon_link identifier=”022609281X” locale=”US” tag=”douloschristo-20″]Amazon[/easyazon_link] ]

A library is not just a collection of books, but also the buildings that house them. As varied and inventive as the volumes they hold, such buildings can be much more than the dusty, dark wooden shelves found in mystery stories or the catacombs of stacks in the basements of academia. From the great dome of the Library of Congress, to the white façade of the Seinäjoki Library in Finland, to the ancient ruins of the library of Pergamum in modern Turkey, the architecture of a library is a symbol of its time as well as of its builders’ wealth, culture, and learning.

 

[easyazon_image align=”left” height=”333″ identifier=”1440576246″ locale=”US” src=”https://englewoodreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/51Ia758wXWL.jpg” tag=”douloschristo-20″ width=”246″]I Work At A Public Library: A Collection of Crazy Stories from the Stacks

By Gina Sheridan

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Straight from the library–the strange and bizarre, ready to be checked out!

From a patron’s missing wetsuit to the scent of crab cakes wafting through the stacks, I Work at a Public Library showcases the oddities that have come across Gina Sheridan’s circulation desk. Throughout these pages, she catalogs her encounters with local eccentrics as well as the questions that plague her, such as, “What is the standard length of eyebrow hairs?” Whether she’s helping someone scan his face onto an online dating site or explaining why the library doesn’t have any dragon autobiographies, Sheridan’s bizarre tales prove that she’s truly seen it all.

Stacked high with hundreds of strange-but-true stories, I Work at a Public Library celebrates librarians and the unforgettable patrons that roam the stacks every day.

 

[easyazon_image align=”left” height=”333″ identifier=”1476764832″ locale=”US” src=”https://englewoodreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/5153JKewj9L.jpg” tag=”douloschristo-20″ width=”220″]The Time Traveler’s Wife: A Novel

By Audrey Niffenegger

[ [easyazon_link identifier=”1476764832″ locale=”US” tag=”douloschristo-20″]Amazon[/easyazon_link] ]

The beloved, mega bestselling first novel from Audrey Niffenegger, “a soaring celebration of the victory of love over time” (Chicago Tribune).

A MOST UNTRADITIONAL LOVE STORY, this is the celebrated tale of Henry DeTamble, a dashing, adventuresome librarian who inadvertently travels through time, and Clare Abshire, an artist whose life takes a natural sequential course. Henry and Clare’s passionate affair endures across a sea of time and captures them in an impossibly romantic trap that tests the strength of fate and basks in the bonds of love.

 

[easyazon_image align=”left” height=”333″ identifier=”B00THHIVVM” locale=”US” src=”https://englewoodreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/518GQBu2UHL.jpg” tag=”douloschristo-20″ width=”217″]Reading Publics: New York City’s Public Libraries, 1754-1911

by Tom Glynn

[ [easyazon_link identifier=”B00THHIVVM” locale=”US” tag=”douloschristo-20″]Amazon[/easyazon_link] ]

This lively, nuanced history of New York City’s early public libraries traces their evolution within the political, social, and cultural worlds that supported them.

Tom Glynn’s vivid, deeply researched history of New York City’s public libraries over the course of more than a century and a half illuminates how the public and private functions of reading changed over time and how shared collections of books could serve both public and private ends. Reading Publics examines how books and reading helped construct social identities and how print functioned within and across groups, including but not limited to socioeconomic classes. The author offers an accessible while scholarly exploration of how republican and liberal values, shifting understandings of “public” and “private,” and the debate over fiction influenced the development and character of New York City’s public libraries in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Reading Publics is an important contribution to the social and cultural history of New York City that firmly places the city’s early public libraries within the history of reading and print culture in the United States.
 

 

[easyazon_image align=”left” height=”333″ identifier=”0393351459″ locale=”US” src=”https://englewoodreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/41bnxgxRL5L.jpg” tag=”douloschristo-20″ width=”222″]Library: An Unquiet History

By Matthew Battles

[ [easyazon_link identifier=”0393351459″ locale=”US” tag=”douloschristo-20″]Amazon[/easyazon_link] ]

Through the ages, libraries have not only accumulated and preserved but also shaped, inspired, and obliterated knowledge. Now they are in crisis. Former rare books librarian and Harvard MetaLAB visionary Matthew Battles takes us from Boston to Baghdad, from classical scriptoria to medieval monasteries and on to the Information Age, to explore how libraries are built and how they are destroyed: from the scroll burnings in ancient China to the burning of libraries in Europe and Bosnia to the latest revolutionary upheavals of the digital age. A new epilogue elucidates the preservation of knowledge amid the creative destruction of twenty-first century technology. 10 illustrations

 

[easyazon_image align=”left” height=”333″ identifier=”0544176561″ locale=”US” src=”https://englewoodreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/51pkMsO2maL.jpg” tag=”douloschristo-20″ width=”222″]The Name of the Rose: A Novel

By Umberto Eco

[ [easyazon_link identifier=”0544176561″ locale=”US” tag=”douloschristo-20″]Amazon[/easyazon_link] ]

The year is 1327. Franciscans in a wealthy Italian abbey are suspected of heresy, and Brother William of Baskerville arrives to investigate. When his delicate mission is suddenly overshadowed by seven bizarre deaths, Brother William turns detective. His tools are the logic of Aristotle, the theology of Aquinas, the empirical insights of Roger Bacon—all sharpened to a glistening edge by wry humor and a ferocious curiosity. He collects evidence, deciphers secret symbols and coded manuscripts, and digs into the eerie labyrinth of the abbey, where “the most interesting things happen at night.”

“Like the labyrinthine library at its heart, this brilliant novel has many cunning passages and secret chambers . . . Fascinating . . . ingenious . . . dazzling.” – Newsweek

 

[easyazon_image align=”left” height=”333″ identifier=”B008B8WN6M” locale=”US” src=”https://englewoodreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/51yLhNJaOqL.jpg” tag=”douloschristo-20″ width=”217″]A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books

By Nicholas Basbanes

[ [easyazon_link identifier=”B008B8WN6M” locale=”US” tag=”douloschristo-20″]Amazon[/easyazon_link] ]

This book is an adventure among the afflicted — those with the passion to possess books. Richly anecdotal and fully documented, it combines the perspective of historical research with the immediacy of investigative journalism. Above all, it is a celebration of books and the people who have revered, gathered and preserved them over the centuries. From the great library of Alexandria, through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance to the 20th century, here is a gallery of revealing profiles of past and present collectors. A comprehensive bibliography on books is included.

 

[easyazon_image align=”left” height=”333″ identifier=”0061431613″ locale=”US” src=”https://englewoodreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/517iIc4MsJL.jpg” tag=”douloschristo-20″ width=”222″]This Book Is Overdue!: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All

By Marilyn Johnson

[ [easyazon_link identifier=”0061431613″ locale=”US” tag=”douloschristo-20″]Amazon[/easyazon_link] ]

Those who predicted the death of libraries forgot to consider that, in the automated maze of contemporary life, none of us—expert and hopelessly baffled alike—can get along without human help. And not just any help: we need librarians, the only ones who can save us from being buried by the digital age. This Book Is Overdue! is a romp through the ranks of information professionals—from the blunt and obscenely funny bloggers to the quiet, law-abiding librarians gagged by the FBI. These are the pragmatic idealists who fuse the tools of the digital age with their love for the written word and the enduring values of free speech, open access, and scout-badge-quality assistance to anyone in need.