Sunday, November 5, 2017

Book #117: Dear Fahrenheit 451: Love and Heartbreak in the Stacks by Annie Spence

I'm a sucker for books about books, even though they sometimes end up being more meta than they need to be. In this book, Spence writes letters, some love letters and some break-up letters, to books on the shelves of her library that she works at. She talks a bit about the job of a librarian and the magic of recommending books to people, and the librarian's job of weeding the stacks of books that aren't being read or have an audience any more, and gives a lot of recommendations for books that readers might like. The letters about the books she loves were really great--she was able to write about and describe them beautifully and made me want to read each one. The letters to the books she didn't like were more kitschy and less interesting. I mean, the ones about books like Twilight, which she dislikes on principle, were fine, but there were at least five random books that they were getting rid of from the library (like, a book about the one-hour orgasm, or doing cat dissections) that she wrote about, which weren't really that funny. They should been taken out and she should have written more substantive letters about books she actually disliked for real reasons. I enjoyed listening to it, but it really would have been a better one to read. I would probably like to revisit it and read it, just to get through the books that she recommends because they sound awesome, and it was hard to really keep track of them while listening to the book. Her writing was very well-crafted and nice to listen to, and the narrator was good, but it would have been better as a read.

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