If there is any industry or service that has had to hear the braying prognostications of pessimistic doomsayers more than the library, it has to be the newspaper business. In that regard I feel a particular kinship with those who continue to toil tirelessly for the journalistic profession, especially if we are related by blood. In conjunction with the recent release of the documentary Page One: Inside the New York Times, I decided to interview Laurie Hertzel, Books Editor of the Minneapolis Star Tribune and (in full journalistic disclosure) my aunt.
Last year Laurie published News to Me: Adventures of an Accidental Journalist, a memoir chronicling her storied career, from her self-published childhood one-sheet, whose circulation went no further than her uninterested family, to her current position, in which she holds sway over the book-buying populace of the Twin Cities–the third and seventh most literate cities in the U.S. (after Seattle, of course, and Washington D.C.).
In your book you make some pretty disparaging remarks about your early years spent working in a library. Care to backpedal now that the best library system in the universe is giving you the time of day?
I love libraries. Always have. My mother used to bring me to the Duluth Public Library every Saturday, and it was through poking around at my leisure, alone, that I discovered all of the important books of my childhood–
The Witch of Blackbird Pond, and everything by Noel Streatfeild, Elizabeth Enright, and Sally Watson; and Andrew Lang’s fairy tale books. Later, when she was taking night classes at the College of St. Scholastica, I used to go with her sometimes. The college had a tiny children’s library (it was for library science majors, I think) and I used to sit there while she was in class, and read and read and read.
But it is sadly true that I did not love WORKING in a library. That was just not the life for me.
As Books Editor at the Star Tribune you must have tons of great reading recommendations. Are there any recent works that you’re currently championing?
Oh yes! Room by Emma Donoghue, the best book I read last year. She was totally robbed by the Booker Prize committee. And The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman. I have not seen Page One, but I don’t think anything could come close to his uncanny portrayal of a newsroom and the weird characters who inhabit it. Plus, it’s so funny. I loved Erik Larson’s In the Garden of Beasts, a chilling narrative nonfiction account of innocent–some might say clueless–Americans in Hitler’s Germany. I am so lucky that just about every book that is being published passes my desk. I am also unlucky in that it is impossible for me to read them all….New books are flowing in every day, 1000 a week.
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