Marie Gauthier

We go to the library three times a week most weeks, some days more than once. It’d be more, but the library’s only open three days a week.

This schedule is something my husband can never keep straight in his head, but we live so close to the library that he’s bound to look out the window and say, “Hey, the lights are on in the library — it must be open!”  Eureka!

We love our library. And our librarians, Laurie and Susie. And interlibrary loan. What a fantastic system!

My current borrows include The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Prose Poetry, coming to me all the way from Waubonsee Community College in Sugar Grove, IL; and Mentor and Muse: Essays from Poets to Poets, sent  from the Illinois State Library (And thank you to the blogosphere for alerting me to this book. Unfortunately, I can’t remember whose blog in particular wrote about this — I’m sorry! It was Jeannine! — thank you!).

And then there’s the book that belongs to my library itself, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer. What an ambitious book, so clearly, intelligently written! I picked it up on Saturday, and am already almost done. Because there are so many threads to the history that Mukherjee is weaving together, there can be a fair amount of repetition from section to section, but it’s the perfect amount I think; we lay folks could otherwise find it impossible to follow the different terms and concepts as the author travels from researcher to patient to cancer cell and back.

I’d be interested in this book even if my mother weren’t ill. Who knew that such a disparate and far-ranging history could be so suspenseful?