I was going to buy this book for myself to read over the holidays--sort of a career-path pick-me-up (I'm currently in library school)--but my interlibrary loan request came in at the last minute. I am SO glad I didn't buy it.
Basically, you've got a writer who is torn between being smug and being funny, and who unfortunately rarely succeeds at being either. Early on, one begins to wonder why the book was written...why, indeed, Mr. Douglas is even a librarian at all. In an unbearably condescending voice, he writes about how much he hated his library page job. He writes about how much he hated his coworkers. He writes about how much he hated his superiors, his library school, his professors, and worst of all, his patrons. No one is safe. And then, in the very next breath, he tells us what a noble institution the library is. Now, most of us already know that the library is a noble institution. Unfortunately, the sentiment rings utterly false when it follows a dozen pages of his childish ranting.
It certainly doesn't help that the writing is so clunky (Take this gem, for example: "Over 200,000 volumes were destroyed. It really upset a bunch of people." Imagine that!). Douglas has a particularly annoying habit of contradicting his own opinions. "There are schools for librarians," he writes, "and the idea's not as ridiculous as it often sounds." He then proceeds to explain--at length--just how ridiculous they are. In fact, check out this excerpt on the subject of 9/11: "It's a new dawn for the way we are seeking and are fed our information. For better, for worse, things will never be the same." And the very next sentence, in the very next paragraph? "Maybe the date was important to librarians, but I didn't see it."
WHA--?! About-faces like this are not uncommon. It literally boggles the mind.
Footnotes are another constant irritation. The jacket mentions that Douglas is a McSweeney's contributor, so the presence of footnotes is not exactly a surprise. But boy, what an onslaught! Two or three a page at times, all of them attempts at cleverness, none of them succeeding: "My second semester I also began making friends," he writes. And the footnote? "That sentence makes me sound like such a dork. Please don't hold it against me until you read just a little bit more."
Follow this advice at your own risk.