Beginning with Truman Capote, who started it all, they are authors like John McPhee, the British writer Robert McFarlane, Janet Malcom, Ian Frasier, Bill Bryson, and Dave Eggers, to name only a handful.
In the past forty to fifty years, non-fiction writers have lighted up the landscape with their work. Everything she touches comes alive.Ī word about non-fiction. The author knows exactly when to leave a topic and broach a new one, how to pique your curiosity about something not even remotely interesting on the surface, and how to hold your attention fast, minute by minute. The writing is so good the subject is almost irrelevant. It holds one’s interest in a way few books do. But as soon as I began to read The Library Book, that changed. Think you’re not interested libraries? So did I. Libraries catered to and were run by men, the feminization of library staffs being mainly a 20 th century phenomenon. Women were not even allowed to have library cards and had to remain in Ladies’ Rooms which offered only magazines. Until then, no library in America had been headed by a woman. More astonishing than her youth was her gender. An efficient administrator who could find any book in a few minutes (there was no card catalogue), and hunt down fines like a fiend, she was so young her father had to walk her home every night. In 1880, an eighteen-year-old girl name Mary Foy was appointed head of the Los Angeles Public Library.
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