I recently read a review of The World's Strongest Librarian: A Memoir of Tourette's, Faith, Strength, and the Power of Family that convinced me that this was the kind of book that I loved.
And, on the surface, it really is. A combination of things that
fascinate me- libraries and books, faith, and personal
experience with something that makes him different, in this case,
Tourette Syndrome. I happened to see it on my library shelf shortly
thereafter and picked it up. I mentioned recently that I’ve been doing a
large portion of my reading on the Nook lately,
but I realized there was no point in having all these paper books
checked out if I wasn’t going to make the effort to read them so despite
reading a truly excellent e-book during the day, I started reading this
one at home.
Hanagarne has an easy, conversational style. His
book started with a blog (doesn’t every memoir?) and that writing style
carries over. The book is laid out chronologically, starting with his
childhood and continuing on into his marriage
and late start career. This is the first thing I’ve really read about
Tourette’s. My idea of it was mainly of people yelling out curse words,
but of course it’s much more than that. Hanagarne tries to describe what
the tics are like, and how debilitating it
makes his life, but I am not 100% convinced that he does a good job of
it. He spends a page saying that he can’t fill the book with every tic,
that we just have to imagine adding on to what he’s already said when he
mentions something new. Much of his life
in his 20s is lost to the tics, and he enters and withdraws from
college a dozen times. His mission trip is cut short because of their
severity. He tells us these things, but it’s not very powerful to read
them. I feel like his descriptions are a bit lacking,
that what he’s said about the tics themselves and their impact on him
don’t actually match up.
I had a similar response to his writing about
faith. Hanagarne is a Mormon. He does an excellent job explaining
specific aspects of his faith and what it entails. He writes a very
powerful scene about accepting God in college, but then
he kind of backs off both in his belief and in his writing about it. When his struggles with Tourette’s and his and
his wife’s inability to have a child overwhelm him, he questions God,
but only in the mildest of ways. It felt to me like he’s pulling his
punches, that he doesn’t want to offend any of his
readers, trying to keep both the religious readers and the ones who
don’t care to read about religious struggles. By the end he's honest with the reader, and I can see that perhaps the uninspired writing comes from his apathy towards God, but it made for pretty boring reading, for me.
As an adult, Hanagarne falls into weight lifting as
a method of controlling his tics. He does traditional lifting before
moving onto kettleballs and then spends an entire chapter talking about
this strange individual who is not a trainer
nor doctor nor really a friend who offers opaque advice and waits for
Hanagarne to figure it out. Ultimately, he learns that he can control
his tics with breathing (until he can't), but the book really bogs down while he’s
figuring it out. He could have cut out 90% of the
chapter about the other guy and not lost a thing. I find his dedication
to the task remarkably impressive, as well as his recall of the process
(I’m guessing the blog helps), but he didn’t need to relive entire
conversations.
by Jenny Han was never really on my TBR list. The cover flap specifically says that there are two different boys for her to choose between, and as I've said (over and over probably) I hate this kind of conflict, but then it was there when I was browsing at the new library and so it came home with me.
Final verdict: nice and breezy, summer romance, not going to hit my top ten list. Borrow it from the library, don't buy it.
