#21 in History
The Library Book
- NYT bestseller · 16 weeks on the list, peaked at #6
- Reese's Book Club
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About the book
On the morning of April 29, 1986, a fire alarm sounded in the Los Angeles Public Library. As the moments passed, the patrons and staff who had been cleared out of the building realized this was not the usual fire alarm. As one fireman recounted, “Once that first stack got going, it was ‘Goodbye, Charlie.’” The fire was disastrous: it reached 2000 degrees and burned for more than seven hours. By the time it was extinguished, it had consumed four hundred thousand books and damaged seven hundred thousand more. Investigators descended on the scene, but more than thirty years later, the mystery remains: Did someone purposefully set fire to the library—and if so, who? Weaving her lifelong love of books and reading into an investigation of the fire, award-winning New Yorker reporter and New York Times bestselling author Susan Orlean delivers a mesmerizing and uniquely compelling book that manages to tell the broader story of libraries and librarians in a way that has never been done before.
Where the score comes from
The sources average 8.0 across 245 ratings — not yet many, so the reader vote carries 62% of the weight and the rest pulls toward the History average of 8.0. That is how 8.0 comes out.
| Source | Average | Ratings | Weight |
|---|---|---|---|
| Open Library | 8.3 | 12 | 5% |
| Hardcover | 8.0 | 233 | 95% |
In this book
Themes this book shares with others — each leads to the best books on it.
If you liked this
Same shelf — History — with scores between 7.9 and 8.1, closest to this book.
