Working in a university library is terrific.  I meet all kinds of interesting books – ranging from classics of past decades to new books from academic presses!

Here are some I have checked out right now.

Someone in my writer’s group recommended this book as very helpful given the situation he found himself in. Someone else bought a copy and reports that thanks to this book, his home has become more livable, with less clutter and more grace notes of beauty.

My condo, home office and all, happens to be extremely neat. But out of general interest, I got the book through Interlibrary Loan and. … oh yes, this is proving helpful to me too.

For one thing, most of us have stuff that we don’t need and we’d be well served by turning loose of.  Even if it’s highly organized, a home too full of stuff is a spiritual downer. The Hoarder in You‘s author Robin Zasio explains how shopping opportunities fuel cluttering. She describes the cognitive distortions that result in clutter or worse. (She addresses pathological hoarding, too, so this book is HIGHLY recommended if a family member or friend has this problem.) She has good hints like if you don’t know where you’ll put it, don’t bring it home.

For another thing, I now recognize how cluttering has happened right here in my home office. It’s in my to-do listing. I have a hard time not sticking something sparkly new onto my to-do list.  I already have lists of lists. Some of my to-do lists are so long they’re unwieldy, in their way not unlike a listing pile of physical clutter.   🙁

It’s time to work on this.

The Library Book by Susan Orlean came out in 2018 to rave reviews in library circles. I’m glad I got around to reading it! As a lifelong book lover who writes books and works in a library,  this book resonated with me. I read it in small sections (at lunch at work!) to make it last longer.  🙂

Central to the book is a devastating fire at the Los Angeles Central Library in 1986. The cause of the fire was never established, despite the existence of a suspicious character who might have been there that morning.  The backbone of the book is the fire, the fruitless investigation into its cause, and the hard but finally successful recovery from the fire.  On that backbone, Ms Orleans arranges all kinds of good information.  She tells the turbulent history of that library from its founding on. Along the way, she reflects on her own lifelong love of libraries.  She even describes experimentally burning  a book – a paperback copy of Fahrenheit 451 (!)

Here’s one of many wonderful passages in this book that’s all about libraries, librarians, books, and being human.

The silence was more soothing than solemn. A library is a good place to soften solitude;  place where you feel part of a conversation that has gone on for hundreds and hundreds of years even when you’re all alone. The library is a whispering post.  You don’t need to take a book off a shelf to know there is a voice inside that is waiting to speak to you, and behind that was someone who truly believed that if he or she spoke, someone would listen. . . . I was struck by how precious and foolish and brave that belief is, and how necessary; and how full of hope it is to collect these books and manuscripts and preserve them.

The inside back cover has a picture of a traditional library book pocket and card.  And that’s charming.

A powerful book, this, and beautifully written.  Author Robert Macfarlane explores the caverns, crypts, mines, tombs, glacial caves, underground nuclear waste storage facilities (!), subterranean rivers, and forest root systems beneath our unknowing feet. He meets able guides in all these realms, people who know their way through the caves or mines or catacombs.  And he ponders how human technology can change the world.  The striking book cover painting represents a holloway – a road so well traveled that it’s worn way down into the ground.  Specifically, it’s looking through a holloway toward a nuclear blast.

Highly recommended.

To the strict constructionists who think the Internet, including email, texting, Twitter, and all, is ruining the written language – this book says, “Well, no.” Author Gretchen McCulloch is a linguist who approaches Internet language as more like informal speech than like composed, grammatical writing. For once in the history of linguistics, there’s plenty of such material for her analysis. The informal, spoken word very seldom got documented in ages past.  Now it does.  She has real fun with it all and makes the reader better appreciate the casual, fluid, inventive qualities of Internet language and, for that matter, everyday speech.  Recommended!

Here is a recent (2018) and wonderfully interesting book about structural engineering.  Yes, that topic is interesting – HIGHLY interesting when it come to skyscrapers!  The author, a structural engineer involved with notable projects including London’s towering new skyscraper, the Shard, shares her wonder at bricks and concrete, spider webbing and wind loading, bridges, and  the sorts of calculation that are crucial to the structures of civilization.  She takes the reader around the world to see notable buildings from ancient to modern times. And she looks into the American past to salute Emily Warren Roebling, the defacto chief engineer of the Brooklyn Bridge.  Recommended!