Dear Fahrenheit 451

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  This book is dedicated to the other six Authiers from the double-wide that was always taking in more people and animals than there was space for, who raised me and had such white-hot pride for me I rarely suffered the cold of my own doubt.

  I absolutely demand of you and everyone I know that they be widely read in every damn field there is; in every religion and every art form and don’t tell me you haven’t got time! There’s plenty of time. You need all of these cross-references. You never know when your head is going to use this fuel, this food for its purposes.

  —Ray Bradbury

  Introduction

  Dear Reader,

  Welcome to Dear Fahrenheit 451. Shall we beg—wait, I know you guys! Do you remember me? I’m your public librarian! I walked you over to the Murakami that time. I helped you get the DVD about exploring New Zealand and you came back and told me about how wonderful your trip was and we both got tears in our eyes. Remember when you said you paid my salary and mumbled “bitch” under your breath when I wouldn’t do your kid’s research paper for them? I’m that bitch!

  I know all of you—because librarians love getting to know their communities: from Junie B. Jones Kid to Conspiracy Theory Andy! If I hold up my magic mirror, Romper Room style, I can see each and every one of you reading this right now! I see Geoff, who always says he’s picking up his Regency romances for his sister (no judgment, Geoff!), and I see Donna, who reads philosophical horror novels as fast as I can supply them. I see Carol, whose grandson bought her a tablet and then apparently went into the witness protection program before he could help her figure out how to use it. (In fact, I see all the doting millennials who pat themselves on the back for giving expensive devices to their elderly relatives and then go back to college without explaining how to download an e-book.)

  But as close as my connection is to all of you, your literary preferences and Internet habits, there is a population I know even more intimately: the stacks. Librarians aren’t just reading while we’re sitting at the reference desk. We curate the collection by providing a fine balance of items patrons need to be well-rounded (poetry, Consumer Reports) and items they request that we buy (more seniors’ yoga on VHS). We also decide when a book is no longer needed and has to be “released” (two points if you got that The Giver reference). Professionally, we call this process “weeding” the collection. Personally, I call it “book breakups.”

  I know books on a deep level. So deep that, over the years, I’ve found myself talking to the books. Only in my head, because I’m not crazy; but, inside my head, I talk to them in letter form, because books are fancy and need to be formally addressed. It used to be just at the library, while I was weeding or when I would come across an old friend—I mean, book. But now I seem to do it every time I look at a bookshelf: at my mom’s, at a dinner party, at the bar or on date night. Basically, if you’ve spoken to me in the presence of a bookshelf in the past decade, I wasn’t paying attention.

  And why shouldn’t I talk to books? I’ve got a lot to say to them.

  Reading has shaped me, guided me, reflected me, and helped me understand and connect with, and this is not hyperbole, HUMANITY. If you picked up this book, it’s because, somewhere in the past (and more in the future, if I have anything to do with it) a book has changed your life. Well, mine too, dear reader, mine too. I grew up in a small rural Michigan town. I was the youngest of a big family, living in a tiny house that was overflowing with people, stray dogs, love, and saltine crackers. We didn’t have a lot back then, but we did have the library, and its books showed me a bigger world. I know that sounds confusing, because you’re, like, wait, bigger world? Aren’t you just still hanging out at the library? Did you ever even leave? I only mean that books have shown me some amazing things. They’ve thrilled me and soothed me. They’ve told me when it was time to give up on them. They’ve helped me not give up on myself. Reader, for all of the silliness and good goddamn fun involved in writing a book that talks to books, I know you’ll believe me when I say that these books have talked right back to me.

  And if this book you’re holding could talk? It would say that it wants you to connect to it, to laugh with it, and to walk away with a whole new list of other books that you can’t wait to get involved with. Happy reading.

  Your Ever Lovin’ Librarian,

  Dear Librarians,

  Please don’t weed me.

  Love,

  I.

  Books—The Letters

  Good friends, good books, and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.

  —Mark Twain

  Rule number one: Don’t fuck with librarians.

  —Neil Gaiman, Gaiman’s online Journal, 2004

  FICTION—Tartt, Donna

  —Growing Apart

  Dear The Goldfinch,

  We’ve grown apart. Or, I guess, you’ve grown apart. Like, physically. Your spine is torn to crap. The hardest part about this? I’m the one who did it to you. I love you so much, Goldfinch. Your language, your emotion, your suspense. Needless to say, the author picture on your back cover is the main reason I started parting my hair down the middle.

  So I recommended you to everyone. I broke the Librarian’s Reader’s Advisory Code, which is to base your reading suggestions for a patron on their previous preferences, not my own. I broke it for you, Finchy. I recommended you to folks checking out Sylvia Browne dead-people-talking books and patrons asking where the Amish fiction was shelved and people who told me the last book they enjoyed was Hatchet by Gary Paulsen, which is, sadly, every third adult male who comes into the library. I’m not saying you won the Pulitzer because of me, but you may want to think about adding one more name in the acknowledgments when the next edition comes out. You feel me?

  Unfortunately, your hard exterior couldn’t protect you from the reality of the world outside these shelves. It was bound to happen. You’re nearly eight hundred pages. And about a gazillion people cracked you open. Eventually, you cracked too. It’s my fault. I shouldn’t have sent you home with people who are used to reading mass-market paperbacks. That’s something I have to live with.

  I know you are a book that only feels fulfilled when being read and admired. You’d be too ashamed to sit next to your other copies as busted up as you are, and there’s nothing book glue can do for you now. You don’t smell or anything, if that’s a consolation. I’m taking you home with me. You’ll sit right next to your old pal The Little Friend, on a browser-friendly shelf above the record player where my friends will look at you with great reverence before declining to borrow you because they are too busy to read (I know, they’re fools). I’m the only one who truly knows you well enough to notice how fragile you are on the inside. No one but you and I will ever see the duct tape holding you together or the DISCARD stamp on your title page. I promise you that.

  Seriously Forever Yours,

  FICTION—Tolstoy, Leo

  —Classic Ru
ssian Literature

  —The Bachelor

  —Choices

  Dear Anna Karenina,

  I feel like I don’t even know you. Maybe that’s why I find it so difficult to say: I’ve been seeing someone else.

  Geez, I’m sorry. I know I’ve led you on. I asked my friends about you. I checked you out more than once. You came home with me. You stayed for a month! But while you were on my coffee table, looking so earnest and so very long, Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell was in my bed. And then some Megan Abbott mysteries. And then Dolly Parton’s autobiography. Twice.

  I tried, I really did. Once, I even picked you up and held you. I kept you on my lap while I watched The Bachelor. And you made me feel better. Like I wasn’t just some faceless citizen of Bachelor Nation. I read Russian literature! I thought to myself. I’m just smugly observing this show until the next commercial, when I will begin my scholarly analysis. But then I kept watching through “After the Final Rose.”

  Anna, I don’t have one unkind word to say about you—because I haven’t read you. Perhaps, it’s just not our time. There will come a day, probably, when I get a hankering for a bleak 864-page novel translated from Russian. But until that day, back to the shelves you go.

  I tried to look up “goodbye” in Russian, but it’s really hard to spell. So, just—

  Goodbye,

  FICTION—Eugenides, Jeffrey

  —Creepy Stories

  —Creepy Love for Creepy Stories

  Dear The Virgin Suicides,

  Congratulations on your fifteenth consecutive year as my favorite book. To mark this commemorative anniversary, I’m writing you a love letter. It’ll be moony goony nonsense compared to your perfection, but the thing you’re perfect about is conveying imperfect love. So even though this is going to look a little bit like pen puke, I hope you’ll appreciate its sincerity.

  Here goes.

  I love that you have no plot and an electric story at the same time. The five Lisbon sisters commit suicide in the suburbs of Detroit; their neighbor boys loved them and couldn’t understand them. We know that in your first few pages. Nothing else happens. Except everything. Except tiny beautiful moments of arms barely touching, and records playing over the phone, and sad math teachers, and goal-line chalk striping a beautiful girl’s back—all of the minutiae that composes lives and somehow adds up to death.

  I love every one of your fucking golden sentences. They are slam-you-shut-and-clutch-you-against-my-chest sublime. The description of the adornments that spill around the teenage girls, and the entire swooning Trip Fontaine passage, oh man, I wanted him to save Lux Lisbon so bad. Then, that last paragraph made me want to collapse on a fainting couch and linger for the rest of the day with your delicate memory.

  I love that after I read you, every time, my own everyday movements and the quotidian moments of my life feel more beautiful. That’s the mark of a lovely book. You make me want to never look at my phone again—to abandon Facebook in favor of old astronomy books and nature guides. I just want to brush my hair languidly in front of the mirror, sift through old costume jewelry, hold hands, and listen to way more Bread.

  It’s more than that, though. I feel like you get me. Like, get me. I don’t feel like you were written for me. I feel like you were written FROM INSIDE OF my psyche. The hazy gaze with which you look back on suburban Detroit is the same lens I was spying through growing up. My folks having moved from Detroit to rural mid-Michigan before I was born, those cities and the people left behind were a dreamy, mysterious world that existed in the Before Time of my parents’ lives.

  I was enamored with and naive of “downstate,” as we called it, in the same way your narrators were always reaching for and never quite grasping the Lisbon sisters. The “fuzzy aura” that Trip saw surrounding Lux echoed the one I saw glowing around my older cousin Melanie when she came to visit from Detroit. The music the boys play for the girls after Mrs. Lisbon makes Lux burn her records was the music my dad put on our record player, and when he listened he got a far-off look in his eyes.

  When I left for college, a whopping forty-five minutes away from home, I found myself drawn to the city girls in my dorm hall. Girls who called their purses “bags” and had gone to foreign countries for senior trip. Who had been to concerts that did not take place at the fairgrounds. Who owned hair straighteners and manicure kits. Who took for granted all the music and art and stories that grew from the same place they were from. These girls often felt compelled to give me life advice as they smoked next to their open windows, because they could tell I admired them and because they found the podunk homecoming queen vibe I gave off endearing. Absolutely all of it was terrible advice. But I don’t mind because eventually one of those smoky window conversations, where I let them pretend to be Carrie from Sex and the City and wax nonsensical, led me to a conversation about you, V.S. I’d never heard of you or your movie, further cementing my charming rural bumpkin reputation. Anyway, they let me borrow you. From your first paragraph I knew that, finally, I could identify that feeling of reminiscing for a place I had never known but felt connected to. It felt like fate.

  How else could I explain this kismet I feel? Oh, I know—you’ll get this because it’s another Michigan reference: you feel like the first time I heard “Against the Wind” by Bob Seger. Like, I’m seven years old, with no true drifter days under my belt yet, but I’m still swaying in that station wagon going, “Goddammit. He’s got nothing left to burn. He’s just livin’ to run and runnin’ to live.” That’s how close I feel to you. Seger close.

  This year, I moved to the suburb you take place in. (Not because of you—I’m not that weird.) And, I’m reminded of you now that it’s fish-fly season, which is when your tale begins. The bugs are blanketing store windows and cracking under our bare feet on the cement steps we sit on in the evening. The neighbors and the gas lamps in each suburban yard are already swathed in nostalgia for me, a mix of my own history and the fictional one you created. Our stories are braided together.

  This is all to say, God, I think you’re groovy.

  Happy Anniversary,

  GENERAL MATHEMATICS—Rogers, James T.

  —Calculators

  —Old as Shit

  Dear The Calculating Book: Fun and Games with Your Pocket Calculator,

  We never go out anymore. To be more specific: you. You are REALLY not getting out much these days. It’s not that recreational mathematics isn’t a thing anymore. I guess it’s just that—how do I say this? Remember how on your book cover you ask if we have ever wanted to greet a friend electronically? People have kind of figured out how to do that without turning their calculators upside down to spell “Hello.”

  We used to have so much fun together! Remember 80085 (“Boobs”!)? I couldn’t get enough of that in the old days. But now when we meet, you say things like “A few extraordinarily rich men have displayed the quirk of never carrying any cash” and “Your calculator can give you advice on driving.” You know about GPS, right? Have you even heard of Google? It’s 379009 upside down.

  This is hard for me. I still like your “electronic whiz kid” bravado. You’ve still got a bit of the ole charisma. But the kids think the picture of the calculator on your cover is, like, the first iPhone. I’m making a Brain Games display next month. There’s a book from 1983 about the video-game craze you might like to meet. I’ll put you two next to each other and hope that your “old-school” covers work some magic when the kids come in to play Minecraft. If that doesn’t work, it’s Free Box time.

  L8R (That’s LATER),

  FICTION—Christie, Agatha

  —Mystery Series

  —Ladies, Old ’N’ Sassy

  —Sure Bets

  Dear Miss Marple Series,

  You guyssssss! I just want to thank you for being there for me. Everybody loves you. Seriously, everybody. I mean, people who like mysteries—doy. But also, did you know that truckers love you? You guys on audio are like a gateway drug to reading
for truckers. Also, kids who read way above their grade level and are bored with everything in the children’s section. The cute ’n’ gawky ones who get big smiles when you give them a book, and they sit down on the floor and start reading it immediately. And teens with helicopter parents who want to make sure they aren’t reading novels with sex in them (as a rule, murder in a book is a-okay with these folks). And millennials love you because they picture your main character as Mrs. Doubtfire.

  You make my job so much easier on days when I spend the better part of an hour with a patron, placing stacks of books in front of them, shelling out the “If You Like” bookmarks like it’s my job (which it is) and presenting each tome to a frowning face.

  “Something historical. No, that’s too historical.”

  “I definitely want death, but don’t necessarily want to read about anyone dying.”

  “I’d like to be intrigued, but not confused.”

  And then, like a clammy grandmotherly hand gently smacking my cheek, your name comes to me. You are popular enough that everyone has heard of you, old enough that at least one of you is always available on the shelves. You’re sassy enough for a chortle, and well-mannered enough that you won’t offend church ladies or parents who monitor every library book their child checks out, apparently unaware of Snapchat. You can be read in any order. You’re clever in an “oh yoooou” kind of way that doesn’t make your readers feel dumb. And you’re a “cozy” series that is also well written—the romping unicorn of the Mystery section.