Posted 11:30 a.m. Friday, May 2, 2025
Man of Leisure, Volume Two: Part Five
“A library, no matter how humble or grand, is a series of sacred gateways. You pass through them and leave your own city behind; you journey through time and space; and for a little while, you escape the confines of your own circumstances.”--Anthony Doerr, Cloud Cuckoo Land
Books are my favorite coworkers. They never get you sick. They always got a fun story to tell you over lunch. And, most importantly, they never schedule a meeting on Friday afternoons. I’d nominate them for a University Staff Council Excellence Award if I could.
When I was in the hospital, the books visited and would stay with me even when I fell asleep. When I was discharged after a month, they offered comforting words of encouragement as I healed at home, restricted to my futon as I kept my leg propped up above my heart to speed up the healing on my foot. When I returned to Gundersen twice a week to have wound re-wrappings, they tagged along with me in a grey shoulder bag and kept me pleasant company in various waiting and examination rooms as doctors battled over when I could return back to work in any capacity.
So, it should be little to no surprise to you, dear reader, that when I breezed into Murphy Library on a knee scooter and a prayer not to tip over on the sidewalk during finals week in December, it was the books who were some of the first things to greet my happy return. There they were in tech services, lined up, shoulder to shoulder or I guess book spine to book spine, on several carts in a wagon formation at my cubicle, each more eager than the next to get back to work together.
Oh, and my human coworkers were pretty pumped about my return as well as they filtered in and out tech services to wish me well and to show off the bow ties they were all wearing in honor of my return to Murphy.
“I do not know how you wear these every day,” my coworker Sam said while trying to properly adjust and put on a bow tie.
“Years and years of making them my sole personality trait helps,” I explained.
We were back, in limited fashion, toiling away for a few hours with my leg propped on a knee scooter as I get back into the business of new books to sticker, old books to be withdrawn. The winter break played out like this, day after day, knee scootering across the campus to come and catalog and work with my book colleagues. Each day got easier; each task awoke a bit of muscle memory within me.
By the time the time spring semester began, I was back full-time. And two weeks into the semester, I had returned back to my old haunt, the hospital.
“Excuse my breath,” the nurse as I sat on the examination table. “We had a potluck today and people put garlic in all these dishes like we don’t work with the public.”
I laid back as she took off my compression sock and the bandaging on my foot.
“You’re healed!” she exclaimed, quickly followed by, “You can walk again!” She paused. “This deserves cake. I should get you some cake from our breakroom.”
“No cake for me,” I declined. “I’m trying to keep the rest of my toes.”
And just like that, 165 days of dealing with this traumatic event was over in the span of a ten-minute appointment.
That Friday, I stood in front of Murphy Library, my ears covered in a red buffalo check hat and my leopard print lunch bag in hand, and took it all in. If I’m being honest, and why wouldn’t I be since we’ve shared so much already, my apartment is just a place where I sleep, eat and play an inordinate amount of Super Nintendo on the weekends. My home, you know where your heart’s supposed to reside, is UWL.
I’ve been on this campus since I was a fetus, as my mother, pregnant but persistent, taught her multicultural children’s literature courses at Morris Hall. When I was older, I spent my days running up and down the hallways of Graff Main Hall while my father graded papers in his office. I never went to dances in high school, but I was perpetually in attendance of functions at the Cartwright Center that invariably ended with a Soul Train dance line. The first concert I ever went to was at the Recreational Center (the Goo Dolls with the New Radicals as the opening act). Every step of my childhood, adolescence, and young adult life was shaped in some part by this institution.
And now here in my forties (early forties, let the record show THAT), I now spend my days cataloging books once again. I update records, find the appropriate call numbers, sticker them, and then push the cart of new books up to the front for circulation to put them on the new book displays. It is a job obsessed with labeling and relabeling, categorizing and recategorizing, constantly finding new, better ways of looking at things.
I used to think of Murphy Library as only a job and my coworkers as just the people I work with, who sort of flit in and out of my 9 to 5 existence but aren’t part of my outside life. But mere coworkers don’t bike to your hospital room to deliver flowers in 90-degree weather to see the white of your eyes to make sure you’re okay. They don’t come every few days while you’re in rehab to make you laugh. They don’t deliver the New York Times Art section for you to peruse as you wait for another surgery. Coworkers don’t help move you into your new apartment, pick up your knee scooter for you, make sure everything is going well. They don’t listen to you trying to make sense of this traumatic experience. Coworkers from across the campus don’t come and stay up with you until midnight at the hospital, talking and watching Food Network competitions. They don’t bring you with homemade chicken enchiladas (Caleb, I still have your glass dish!).
And just like how I recategorize books from reference to stax, from stax to leisure, I found myself relabeling folks from coworker to something else entirely.
“You work with a lot of great people,” my mother told me in one of our daily check-in phone calls.
“Yeah,” I replied. “I have a lot of great friends here.”
Well, I think that’s the end of my story, at least for now. I hope I didn’t take up too much of your time. Last year I suggested that people should choose their own adventures like that book series. This past year, I’ve learned that sometimes the adventures are chosen for you. They can be funny, they can be serious, they can even be near death. But if you have people beside you, they can also be conquered.
But I should get going. I’m halfway through this absolutely riveting thriller that I can’t put down. Maybe we can talk about that the next time we see each other. Until then, remember: stay well-read and well-rested.
41. Never Whistle at Night: An Indigenous Dark Fiction Anthology by Shane Hawk
Synopsis: A collection spooky stories ranging in different types of horror written by Indigenous authors.
Review: It’d be easy for me to say that you should read this anthology because it’s helping to uplift the varied voices of Indigenous writers. And it does that. But the main reason you should read this book is that its horror is as varied as its writers. The sequencing of the short stories is so smart that no two horror stories feel like they are treading the same ground, especially one that follows another. It’s an ooky spooky good time for those who want to experience horror from some different perspectives.
42. The Committed by Viet Thanh Nguyen
Synopsis: A sequel to The Sympathizer, The Committed picks up the story of the unnamed protagonist as he wheels and deals in Paris after the Vietnam War as a drug dealer and communist spy.
Review: Did I fully read this book before realizing that this was a sequel? And was the only reason why I came to this realization was that I had kept seeing ads for the HBO adaptation for The Sympathizer on YouTube and kept thinking to myself that the premise of a “A Vietnamese communist spy trying survive all his spying intrigue” sounded familiar? Yes, to all the above. So, how does the book hold up when you read it independent of the first novel? Surprisingly well, I must say. The fact that I got so far into the book without realizing it was a sequel is a testament to Nguyen crafted tales that are related to each other but also could stand on their own.
43. The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen
Synopsis: An unnamed communist double agent tries to keep his identity secret from everybody, including his violently anti-communist best friend, as he does everything from working for a general to being a consultant on a movie about the Vietnam War.
Review: A book filled with this much violence and misery has no business being this funny but here we are. As told through the first-person narration of a communist double agent, The Sympathizer is a bleakly humorous look at the personal toll that war can take on people. Endlessly quotable with a cast of highly memorable characters, the book has a freewheeling, almost dangerous energy about it as it reveals a perspective of the Vietnam War that is rarely portrayed in mainstream media. You might not “like” any of the characters and their actions, but you’ll also never be bored by them, either.
44. The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams
Synopsis: A British woman working on the Oxford Dictionary strives to have equal representation of words used by British women of a range of class statuses against the background of the suffragette movement.
Review: I know it’s a bit silly to admit this, but I never thought of a dictionary as an edited piece of work. Yet, that’s what it is. There are words with their accompanying definitions in it and, as every Scrabble player knows, there are words we use that are not. Who makes those decisions, who deems what words have the merit to be memorialized in print? Pip Williams’s clever novel looks at the making of Oxford Dictionary from a feminist POV as an intrepid young woman wants to capture all the words that don’t make it into the dictionary. A seemingly cutesy premise is given a lot of weight as Williams gives such a firm place and time with the suffragette movement happening at the same time. The novel puts a spotlight on how the world is always being shaped for us. A great read.
45. The Housemaid by Freida McFadden
Synopsis: In this mystery/thriller, a nanny employed by a difficult mom and a handsome dad to take care of their precocious child slowly discovers that there is a lot going on than just naps and errands in this job.
Review: What starts as a nightmare boss novel in mold of The Devil Wears Prada or even The Nanny Diaries slowly reveals itself to be something much more fun, sinister, and twisted than what it first appears. To tell you anymore would be a dereliction of my duty as a reviewer. And you never know when you might need a good reference.
46. Assistant to the Villain by Hannah Nicole Maehrer
Synopsis: Based on a hit TikTok series, this satirical story explores what it would be like to the assistant to, you guessed it, to a villain while exploring what makes a villain and what makes a hero.
Review: I’ll admit this upfront. I thought this book was annoying as can be UNTIL I talked to one of my colleagues about it and she explained that a lot of the things I didn’t enjoy in the book (the characters, the plot, the setting, the everything of it all I guess) were satirical takes on fantasy tropes that I wasn’t well-versed in as not a regular reader of fantasy. After doing some Google searches and watching a few TikToks made by Maehrer that preceded the book, I had a complete 180 turn on the novel. My mistake was going into this book with earnestness that did not see the book for the funny satire that it was and that’s my fault as a reader and not of the author. That’s the magic of reading and forming communities through it. You learn something new all the time, even about yourself.
47. Canary Girls by Jennifer Chiaverini
Synopsis: A historical fiction novel set during World War 1, a diverse group of British women work at an arsenal factory, finding friendship and independence.
Review: When it comes to World Wars media, the First World War feels lost in the shadow of all the books that have been written about World War II. And within that, the contributions of women to the war effort can feel scant. Chiaverini sets out to bring to light the contribution of women in this heartwarming tale of a disparate group of women toiling away in an arsenal factory as both the war and the suffragette movement wage on. Slowly moving at first as the Chiaverini as takes her time to establish each woman as an individual, this slow start pays off greatly once all the characters are working together. Each woman is carefully defined without sinking into just being a hollow archetype. A satisfying and illuminating read that has made me want to delve more into Chiaverini’s other historical fiction.
48. The End of Drum-Time by Hanna Pylväinen
Synopsis: A historical romance/family drama detailing the romance between a reindeer herder and the daughter of strict preacher as their community descends into chaos.
Review: Boy meets girl. Boy falls in love with girl. Boy must contend with girl’s strident preacher father and his own father’s spiritual awakening while trying to keep their deer herding lifestyle afloat. Tale as old as time, right? An absorbing read I could not put down, The End of Drum-Time is fascinating on one level as just a very good, soapy tale of love, anger, religious fervor, etc., but on a deeper level it is an examination of what happens to a community struggling to maintain the status quo.
49. Crooked Manifesto by Colson Whitehead
Synopsis: A rousing caper novel, which is a sequel to Harlem Shuffle, the story picks up in the late 60s and into the 70s as furniture salesman and part-time fence Ray Carney wheels and deals his way through a decaying New York City.
Review: As much of an exploration of the deterioration of New York City in the 1970s as it is a crime fiction novel, Colson Whitehead’s follow-up to Harlem Shuffle is fun bit of historical fiction that has none of the stuffiness that can be associated with that. More episodic in nature than Harlem Shuffle, Crooked Manifesto lacks some of the spark of the first book but is still a highly enjoyable read as Whitehead has crafted a story that stands alone with a whole new slew of entertaining characters to read about.
50. Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr
Synopsis: An expansive piece of historical, contemporary, and science fiction, Cloud Cuckoo Land tells one epic story that spans from a spaceship in the future, a contemporary Ohio library and all the way back to ancient Constantinople.
Review: A wild ride of a book that jumps through space and time that managed to keep my attention the entire 640 pages because of the emotional core at its center. Doerr never lets the grandiosity of the proceedings overwhelm the characters or let them become just archetypes in service of just BIG IDEAS he is trying to get across. It is a dense book that can be intimidating at first, but I found it to be a very engrossing read overall.
Want more "Man of Leisure"?
Volume One, Column One: Once Upon a Time...
Volume One, Column Two: Life, Death and the Pages In-Between
Volume One, Column Three: The Summer I Turned Pretty Sober
Volume One, Column Four: (101) Books of Summer
Volume One, Column Five: Ever After
Volume Two, Part One: The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Reader
Volume Two, Part Two: The Good Book
Volume Two, Part Three: Scary Essays to Tell in the Dark
Volume Two, Part Four: "It's Only a Paperback Moon"