Library memoirs smackdown.

Welcome to Round One of the championship match between two library worker memoirs: Scott Douglas's Quiet, Please: Dispatches from a Public Librarian, and Dan Borchert's Free For All: Oddballs, Geeks, and Gangstas in the Public Library.

Okay, let's start.  Douglas's book features a lot of talk about what it means to work in a library and be a public servant.  Borchert's book features shorter chapters telling more amusing tales about the aforementioned oddballs, geeks, and gangstas who frequent the library.

That's one point to Borchert.

Douglas's book also features several boring chapters on his escapades in library school, which failed to capture my interest at all.  Borchert pretty much skips all that in favor of more action-oriented, if scarier, chapters about actually working in the library.

That's two for Borchert.

Douglas starts his chapters which a device this reader used to enjoy but now just finds annoying because it's been overused: "Being the part where our hero discovers library school is pretty much the most absurd thing librarians ever invented* and his faculty advisor is kind of a dick."  Borchert doesn't.

Are you starting to see my point?

I don't know why I didn't enjoy Quiet, Please much, much more than I did.  It wasn't that I thought Free For All was such a great book; I was actually very excited to get Quiet, Please because I thought it might be better.  But it wasn't.  Not for me, anyway.  And I know this because I was able to finish Free For All, and it didn't give me the feeling that I really disliked the author.  Every now and then Douglas gets it right ("the loudest elderly women always had the quietest elderly husbands") but all in all?  Very disappointing.  The book had its origins in McSweeney's Dispatches from a Public Librarian, which I actually like more than I liked his book.  Consider reading those first.

And, one last thing: does anyone else find it strange that in a profession dominated by women, the two memoirs available are by men?  I don't usually have paranoid feminist leanings but this makes me wonder.

*Well, I can't really disagree with this point.

Comments

[Brandon]

May I propose another smackdown? In keeping with your new communist outlook, you should do a Karl Marx vs. the founding fathers post. At least write a post about "The Communist Manifesto"? Pleeeease? :)

[CitizenReader]

Okay, Brandon, that sounds like a LOT of work, plus I'd have to actually read the Communist Manifesto (not to mention all sorts of stuff about the Founding Fathers). Think I'll stick with the memoirs.

Have you read the Manifesto? Perhaps you'd like to summarize it for us!

[laura]

The Communist Manifesto actually has some gorgeous prose in it (as does some of the Founding Fathers' work).

I was actually wondering about the two memoirs by male librarians thing as I started reading your post. Clearly, you should write a library memoir that will be better than both of them!

[CitizenReader]

Laura,
I've always meant to read the CM; I have it on a bookshelf somewhere. The Founding Fathers? Oh, I've tried. I think they were smart guys. But often when I read American history I just can't keep my eyes open. I sure wish they'd covered some of that in school. Maybe they did and I've forgotten.

Yeah, the two guys thing is interesting, isn't it? If I had world enough and time I'd do a little study about how much of library science publishing is done by guys--I would guess the amount of publishing by men in libraries is disproportionately high for how many of them work in the field. Will Manley also came to mind as a male library writer and humorist...

[Rick Roche]

I guess I'm just another guy who thinks about writing his library memoirs. There was the time the client asked how to squeeze her cat to make it urinate and the time the boy wanted real photos from space colonies on Mars and ... We probably all have a lot of material. What would be really interesting is to read the library experiences of Citizen Reader.

[Citizen Reader]

RickLibrarian,
I'd be up for reading your library memoir anytime! I didn't particularly mind that both of these were written by library guys, I just wish one or both of them had been more interesting. Maybe you'll write the one that blows these two out of the water?

Oh, well, my library experiences probably wouldn't fill a whole book. How many different ways can you say "today I waited on some people. Most of them annoyed me. I'm pretty sure I annoyed most of them, and oh yeah, fines are massively unpopular"? But that doesn't mean you shouldn't try... :)