DEAR FAHRENHEIT 451. A Librarian’s Love Letters and Break Up Notes to her Books, by Annie Spence (Icon Books, £11.99)
THE author has spent the last 10 years working as a librarian in Midwest America and in this book she takes the unusual premise of writing letters to the volumes she has read, loved, hated and not even read, but borrowed from the library shelves.
In some cases the books have been ignored in the library, but they get a letter from her anyway.
All of them are taken from a wide spectrum; novels, non-fiction, children’s, and even reference books.
Spence actually “talks” to the books in her letters and lets them know what she thought to them, how they let her down or why they have been taken off the library shelves, but it is not a serious criticism.
It is an amusing book, though one can tell the author lives in America, but it does, however, have a serious side as at the end she writes a letter to the reader.
In this she expounds the uses of the public library and the librarians there waiting to help you, a lesson we could all learn today when we have seen so many libraries close.
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