LJ Best Books 2016

A jury of our peers discussed, debated, disagreed, and finally declared LJ’s annual Top Ten Best Books of the year, selected by our editors, as well as Top Five lists for genre fiction, nonfiction, poetry, graphic novels, and SELF-e titles. VISIT THE WEBSITE

Strong in Mind and Body

In The World’s Strongest Librarian (Gotham Bks: Penguin Group [USA]. May 2013), his forthright, affecting, and sometimes surprisingly funny new memoir, Josh Hanagarne discloses a passion for books so great that he claims to see the rest of life as a mere break between bouts of reading. He’s a librarian at the Salt Lake City Public Library who at 6’7” can reach the highest stacks, an Alice in his own Wonderland consumed with asking questions, a modestly observant Mormon with a newfound interest in evolution, and a dedicated weight lifter who tracks his progress through his blog, World’s Strongest Librarian.

He also has Tourette Syndrome, which first became evident when he quaked his way through a Thanksgiving play as a first grader. But in his new book, don’t expect Hanagarne to rail against cruel fate—“there’s always someone suffering worse and handling it better,” he said in a recent phone conversation—or to celebrate an inner strength that readers might emulate. He has no patience with the self-help genre and finds talk of his own courageousness just plain silly. As he confided, “I hope you never hear me say I am inspirational.”

Both on the page and in person, Hanagarne comes across less as upbeat despite it all than simply interested in other things; he’d rather pose another question, pick up another book, or help another library user (though his portraits of the nuttier users are deliciously wicked). During high school, he played on the basketball team and had plenty of friends while seeing himself as a tormented musician with a bad haircut and an inability to attract girls. “For a results-oriented person examining my life on paper, it probably looked like I had nothing to whine about,” he concludes.

Why lift weights

Hanagarne refuses to play noble, insisting that he’s very whiny internally (which is hard to imagine); in his take-charge way he sees such moodiness as “a bridge to the next thing I want to do.” He’s also honest about how painful and debilitating Tourette’s can be. To understand what Tourette’s feels like, Hanagarne suggests jerking your arm or leg repeatedly “and do that until you are tired. Now do that for the next ten hours.” After several failed attempts to find relief from the anguish wrought by the syndrome’s tics, which repeatedly wrench his joints and have caused him to punch himself in the face, he finally turned to weight lifting.

Though Hanagarne laughs at the idea of his being the strongest anything, weight lifting allows him to resist injury and build back the strength he loses with a bad bout of tics; it also gives him a sense of being in control. He launched his blog as a means of tracking his workouts but soon found the need for some sort of narrative, which wasn’t hard as he has been an eager writer since age 15. Naturally, he started writing about books, and his engaging and energetic commentary now attracts somewhere between 2,000 and 5,000 viewers a day.

As evidenced by his blog, it’s not Tourette’s or the weight lifting he uses to counter it that define Hanagarne but his insistently questing mind. The idea that it’s always good to inquire runs throughout Hanagarne’s narrative and ultimately influenced his job choice; as he says in his introduction, “The library taught me that I could ask questions I wanted and pursue them to their conclusion without judgment or embarrassment.” Are librarians best characterized as a naturally curious bunch, then? “That’s very true,” he concurs. “And I would think that even if I never worked at a library.”

Reading as addiction

Beyond his job at the library, Hanagarne is positively swallowed up by his love of reading. “It’s an addiction, asuperior addiction,” he explains. “What makes the world move is stories and ideas.” He therefore watches with particular regret as some youngsters start resisting its lure. “We usually lose the boys first,” he says in his book. “They’re excited about reading at first, but once they get tight with someone who looks down on reading, knowledge, or librarians, their opinions change.” Adults can best counter this drift through example, he argues, and one can safely conclude that Hanagarne’s five-year-old son has never seen his dad without a book in hand or nearby.

In his larger pursuit of knowledge, Hanagarne remains both refreshingly open-minded and skeptically alert. Raised a Mormon, he found less comfort in religion as he grew older and at one point had to take a break from its obligations for health reasons. He’s avidly studying evolution right now, which previously “never seemed worth the bother.” Yet he still describes himself as a mildly religious person, and he doesn’t jump on every bandwagon he sees. Titles on crystals, alternative medicine, self-improvement? Says Hanagarne, “Those books are every bit as dodgy as religion books.”

In the end, says Hanagarne, “I’m not necessarily as concerned with what people think as with how they think. I want to have time to think objectively.” His new book exemplifies that objectivity, displaying an admirably thoughtful and self-effacing approach to what many would see as some tough challenges. Tourette’s can be a bruising experience for the body, but The World’s Strongest Librarian isn’t really about the physical. Even as it recounts Hanagarne’s (perfectly normal) stumbling through coming of age and the wry moments of adulthood, it’s a wondrous evocation of the value of the mind.

Share
Barbara Hoffert About Barbara Hoffert

Barbara Hoffert (bhoffert@mediasourceinc.com, @BarbaraHoffert on Twitter) is Editor, LJ Prepub Alert; past chair of the Materials Selection Committee of the RUSA (Reference and User Services Assn.) division of the American Library Association; and past president, treasurer, and awards chair of the National Book Critics Circle.
http://reviews.libraryjournal.com/2013/05/books/nonfic/soc-sci/strong-in-mind-and-body-may-15-2013/
reviews.libraryjournal.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2017-04
75550
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:XGLZMTACRWI3YULTJIMFNYMXKMYPVLLQ
<urn:uuid:0fe58fd5-6754-4ea5-aebb-82a3d6939371>
2017-01-22T18:33:59Z
216.70.86.237
sha1:6CDKJXFHL3NEXHTACB4V6EQIZ3BLCTOW
<urn:uuid:d3916d70-6acf-451a-bed6-4ef29aed0bb9>
http://reviews.libraryjournal.com/2013/05/books/nonfic/soc-sci/strong-in-mind-and-body-may-15-2013/
length
response
<urn:uuid:88734951-1d4d-4b82-a4f5-e825e9be992b>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2017-04
operator: CommonCrawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web for January 2017
publisher: CommonCrawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf