Librarian Andrea Nelson recommends Dear Fahrenheit 451: Love and Heartbreak in the Stacks: A Librarian’s Love Letters and Breakup Notes to the Books in Her Life by Annie Spence.
Sometimes, life is hard. Really hard. Don’t get me wrong… life is wonderful, too. Love is the most wonderful thing of all, but it sure can sucker-punch you. It happened to me recently. Both of my beloved parents passed away six weeks apart this fall. It is hard to imagine a world without them. The holidays? Terrible. Not having your mom tell you, “Drive safely…there are deer on the road,” every single time you leave her house? Miserable.
The fact that the Golden State Warriors could somehow keep playing basketball without my dad there to watch them with me? Impossible. Yet autumn has somehow turned to winter, and winter will turn to spring. The world keeps turning and taking me along with it. Friends and other family members help, of course. So (they tell me) will time and rest. It’s just hard to imagine when things are still so raw.
Sometimes what helps most is to curl up in front of my fireplace with a book that makes me laugh, and Dear Fahrenheit 451 does just that.
I love this little gem of a book even more because a librarian wrote it. Dear Fahrenheit 451 is a collection of letters the author, Annie Spence, writes to library books. Some are love letters to books she adores, like Ray Bradbury’s seminal classic about a world after books, Fahrenheit 451 (1953). Others are “Dear John” letters to books that—to put it gently—have not aged well.
Spence’s funny, irreverent take on literary classics captivated me when I needed it most.
Spence is clearly a colorful, salty soul. An author who could moonlight as a stand-up comic, her chosen books are personified. In some of her missives, she confesses her own guilty pleasures (cough…romance novels). In others, she regrets her ill-chosen one-night stands. She also bemoans a few books; mainly, those that broke her heart. She lays bare her bitterness over the lofty, unfulfilled promises books like Anna Karenina (1878) leave unfulfilled. (Admit it. You hated Anna Karenina just as much as I did.)
Ever honest, Spence even takes a moment to dash off a few notes to books her library is weeding. [Note: Weeding is a library euphemism for books we pull from the shelves to make room for new books, generally because they have not been checked out for many years…or, well, ever.] Some weeded books get dispatched with a sweet au revoir and a promise of rebirth—others with an overdue good riddance!
Reading Dear Fahrenheit 451 is like stumbling upon a long-lost diary. Even when you know you should stop reading, you can’t. I kid you not…it is as addicting as it is hilarious. The perfect gift for bibliophiles, library-lovers and librarians, it (unlike Anna Karenina) delivers what it promises: bite-sized bursts of much needed joy.
