People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks

People of the Book was supposed to be Augusts' Book Club read, but summer happened, and so it pushed back to September.

Quite appropriate, since September has been linked in my mind inexorably to the smell of books, pencil shavings and plastic binders. Anyway, PotB is fascinating: despite being a Librarian, I hardly ever think of a book as an artifact in and of itself. Brooks is able to bring life into inanimate objects, telling the story of a book through the imagined life of its unplanned guests. While some of the back stories do stretch the imagination (a slave who knows how to read and write in the 15th century? a surprise Jewish lineage at the eleventh hour? hmmm…), most of them are plausible enough, at least for anyone who can tamp down their inner cynic. Also, the main character (Hanna Heath) was a little too contemptuous for my tastes, so I was quite happy to see her narrative broken up by the narratives of far more intriguing voices. The dedication says it all - anyone with a passion for books will enjoy this sumptuous novel. If there were ever heroes in history, they are those that strive to preserve our human stories at all costs.

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For the librarians.

I'll be the first to admit that I fell into my profession rather than chose it. Loving books and being an avid reader does not mean you ever think you'll be a librarian. Then again, as I found out within two weeks of starting my first professional job, no one really knows what a librarian does anyway. I've always liked looking through used books and wondering where they'd ventured in life. I used to do this with library books too, especially travel books, but I soon realised questioning random stains can only lead to terrible results. A few years ago I started a project whereby I would purchase a used copy of a book I loved, re-read it and then leave it in a conspicuous place (local coffee shop, upper level of a Go train, university reading room, etc.) - I confess that I have stopped tracking them, but the idea is still one that I enjoy. The last book I did this with was left on the GO train (one of my favourite spots) and the last time I tracked it, it was in Colombia! This practice got to be expensive and time-consuming so I started a new project this year - I leave sticky notes in books. Sometimes they're little comments about what I thought was interesting; sometimes it's a recommendation to another book…I read a library copy of The Road and on the back cover, I wrote out a quote from Le Petit Prince. The idea of having a conversation without ever speaking is really, well, cool to me.

I sometimes wonder about librarians whose profession is more like a vocation: the first librarians who used camels to share books all over the Arabian desert; the librarian in Basra who risked her life every night to transport as many books as she could carry from her library to her home in order to avoid them being shelled or incinerated. For a long time, libraries were looked upon as a place for the elite to get access to books; this is why the archaic term "patron" was used for a library-card holder and has been dropped to reflect the far more inclusive culture that are fostered at public libraries today. Librarians have always been looked upon as gatekeepers of knowledge. This isn't true - or at least, real librarians don’t want it to be true. Gatekeeper implies that we would deny access to anyone. Rather, librarians have always been about information dissemination: whether you want a cake recipe or the latest fiction bestseller or instructions on how to make a pipe bomb, libraries will have the answer and librarians will help you find them. Moral debates about the kinds of information have always been a part of our profession, more so in our post-911 paranoid society. Despite the images of be-bunned shushers, librarians are the radicals in our ongoing struggle to keep information free and accessible and usually the strongest voices that fight for individual freedom and privacy. Book banning is only a precursor to book burning and I would sneak about in the dead of night to save books from that horrible fate. Would you? If so, perhaps you're a librarian at heart as well. Sometimes, I wish we all were.