Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

Boots!

Where would we be without books?

Where would we be without good?

No to bird.

It's a rhetorical question, sir.

But where would we need without books?

From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Silverblatt. This is Bookworm. My guest is Susan Orlean.

The book is called The Library Book. It's a great title. I don't know how many of you had the same feeling I had for library books. There were so many ceremonies and rituals surrounding going to the library, bringing books back on time, getting the next book in whatever the

series was, or those elaborate times when you could ask the library to get a book it didn't

have from another library. Here was this place. You could get anything. And Susan

writes in her first chapter that when she was bringing her son to the library for the first time,

she remembered going to the library with her mother for the first time, she remembered going to the library with her mother for the first time.

Remember that for me.

I had a moment when my son was assigned a school project when he was in first grade to talk to a civil servant.

And to my surprise, he wanted to talk to a librarian.

I took him to the branch library here in Los Angeles.

We had just moved here.

When I walked into the room with him,

there was something about the quality of the air in the

room, the sounds of a library, the feeling of a library, the light coming into the library

that immediately reminded me of all of those trips that I always took with my mom. My mom used to take me to the

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