BiblioMysteries

Me at Seven

I found myself relating at some level to this description of Israel Armstrong, the unlikely librarian-hero of Ian Sansom's The Case of the Missing Books. The book, set in the small Northern Ireland village of Tumdrun, is full of quirky and amusing characters. Here's a sample:

Books had spoilt him; they had curdled his brain, like cream left out on a summer’s afternoon, or eggs overbeaten with butter. He’ d been a rather bookish child. Right from the off, the youngest of four, the kind of child who seemed to start reading without anyone realizing or noticing, who raced thru non-fiction at an early age and an extraordinary rate, who read Jack Kerouac before he was in his teens, and who by the age of sixteen had covered most of the great French and Russian authors, and who as a result had matured into an intelligent, shy, passionate, sensitive soul, full of dreams and ideas, a wide ranging vocabulary, and just about no earthly good to anyone. His expectations were sky-high and his grasp of reality was minimal.
Israel had grown up in and around libraries. Libraries were where he belonged.

Libraries to Israel had always been a constant. In libraries, he’d always seemed to be able to breathe a little easier. When he walked thru the doors of a library it was like entering a sacred space, like the Holy of Holies! The beautiful hush and the shunting of the brass-handled wooden drawers holding the card catalogues, the reassurance of the reference books and the eminent OEDs, the amusing little troughs of children’s books, all human life was there. And you could borrow it and take it home for two weeks at a time, 9 books at a time.

… his pocket bulging neurotically with emergency paperbacks and newpapers. Just in case he was ever caught short without something to read…

I noticed with interest that Sansom has a new addition to the Mobile Librarian Series: The Book Stops Here: A Mobile Library Mystery. I'm adding it to my to-read list for 2009.