Running the Books, by Avi Steinberg

I've been reading Avi Steinberg's 2010 memoir Running the Books: The Adventures of an Accidental Prison Librarian for our mystery group. Today I finished it, which is good, since we meet tonight. I was really looking forward to this book for a couple of reasons. First, I'm an accidental librarian myself, although in a public library and medical library setting. I wanted to see how his experiences in the profession paralleled my own. To a certain extent, they did. There's that feeling of being out of your depth that you have in the beginning when you're not quite sure how things work. You do eventually get your bearings, though. Working in a prison library has very different dynamics than any other library, and it was fascinating to see how power and authority, and patron relationships play out in that environment. Very different from my experience, and I'm not sure I could have adapted as well as Steinberg did to such unique circumstances. The second thing that really interested my was why a "good Jewish boy" would go into such a line of work. Although Steinberg is nonpracticing and never comes right out and says it, by the end of the book it's clear that he feels a sense of duty imposed by his heritage, a feeling of tikkun olam (restoring the world). This comes through most clearly when he writes about prisoners he has gotten close to, only to lose them to violence. Those are probably some of the most moving parts of the book.