If you have visited your local library lately – and, if not, you are hereby encouraged to do so! – you will have noticed that it is no longer a place of strict silence. Rather, libraries are venues for discussion groups, hang-outs for frazzled nannies, stay-at-home parents and their rowdy charges, and study hubs for headphoned exam students. Chris Paling’s wonderfully engaging book began as a journal when he joined the “service” as a part-timer, after a career as a radio producer and novelist, and his slight wonderment at his own part in this microcosm, almost on the edge of society, lends warmth to his accomplished narration. There are sidetracks into the history of libraries and the Dewey decimal system, along with stories of theft, generosity and the rescue of a big fat bumblebee. All who need help are given it with the sensitivity and respect that often seem to be missing from modern life, so Paling’s library comes across as the most humanitarian of places to be.
