In 1986 Los Angeles' library burned down, but nobody remembers. Susan Orlean will be here

to talk about why and about her latest book, The Library Book. What does it mean to

Blitzkale a business? Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn and PayPal, and a Silicon Valley

investor in just about every other major tech company, will join us to talk about his

new book, Blitzkale. Alexander Altair will give us an update from the publishing world,

plus we'll talk about what we and the wider world are reading. This is the Book Review

podcast from The New York Times. I'm Pamela Paul.

Susan Orlean joins us from San Francisco where she is on Book Tour for her latest book,

The Library Book. Susan, thank you so much for being here.

Thanks for having me on.

Before I get started, I want to say that everyone who does not own the library book should

Google it just to see what it looks like because not to be superficial. It is a beautiful

book. It looks like a library book. There is no dust jacket. It's just a lovely object.

And of course, you have your title, which must have been irresistible.

It was hard to say no to that title. And this is the only book I've ever written where

the title that we began with is the title that we ended with. And there simply was no

question along the way of using anything else. It is nice that it is such a beautiful

object since it in many ways celebrates the idea of a book and of preserving a book

as a book. Because this is a book about the occasional times when those books have

not been preserved. Before I get into it, you just dropped such an interesting little

tidbit that now I need to know what the original title of the Orchid Thief was.

You're not going to believe it because it's so different. The original title was The

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