“The World’s Strongest Librarian”

My wife and I belong to a reading group with which we’ve met pretty much monthly for something on the order of twenty-five years, or  maybe even a bit longer.  There are several people in it whose names would be quite familiar to those who’ve followed Mormon cultural activity, historical writing, and other scholarship over the past half century or more, so it’s been a lot of fun for us.

We typically meet on the first Sunday of each month.  Sometimes the books that we read are Mormon-related; usually they’re not.

Tonight, our book was Josh Hanagarne’s The World’s Strongest Librarian: A Book Lover’s Adventures.  It has a very strong Mormon connection — though, for a number of reasons, it’s certainly not the kind of thing that Deseret Book would ever publish.

For me, such a book illustrates one of the very greatest benefits of reading:  It allowed me to see life and the world through the eyes of a very bright person who suffers from a severe case of Tourette’s syndrome — something that I’m deeply grateful not to have experienced in real life.  In other words, it expanded my personal range a bit.  Reading about something isn’t the same thing as living that thing, of course, but it gives one a taste, and helps one, to at least a small degree, to have “lived” other lives.