Layla Eats Books For Breakfast

"Love, for me, is something I find in books. I read a lot, it's comforting. You're never alone if you live surrounded by books."

There was a certain hype about this book for a few weeks, which was what made me want to find out what this book was about and buy it later on. I was thrilled to have it for two main reason - the theme of this book is a librarian and it is set in a library. Then the cover. I do not know on how many people out there the way a cover looks has an impact but when it comes to me.. oh boy. So when I first saw the cover of The Library of Unrequited Love, I fell in love. Plus when I read all the good things about it and read what the story was about, I was hooked.. only to be disappointed a few weeks later after reading it.

"I prefer the company of books. When I'm reading, I'm never alone, I have a conversation with the book. It can be very intimate."

I do not mean to put a completely bad light at this book, there were a few bits and pieces which I really enjoyed. These were mostly quotes I underlined.

What is going on in this book, basically, is that one morning a librarian finds a reader asleep in her library, a reader who was accidently locked up and involuntarily spent the night there. From start to end, it is one flow of the librarian's speech. She speaks about the system of putting books to their shelves, about history of libraries and about history in general and about this man called Martin, who comes to do his research to her library and who she really likes. I was not very happy about the soliloquy that was going on. I like descriptive parts in books that I read, I like having a chance to put the book down for a moment or just to take my eyes of it to sip my coffee. Not with this one, let me tell you. It is a one-sitting read. To me it felt like a waterfall of words and it quite annoyed me after about fifty pages in, in such a way that I imagined having to listen to this in real life and my head spinned. I would probably run away from this woman. And even the way she said things, the way she was talking about Napoleon one second and the next she was talking about Martin and then back to other part of history.

The 2.5 points I gave this book are for the lovely parts which I actually enjoyed and for the cover (with which the author has nothing to do but anyways..)

"Love life in ruins? Hate everyone? Despair over the state of the planet? Headache? Insomnia? Indigestion? Corns? I can tell you, there's nothing the library can't cure."

"You don't shut yourself up for ten hours a day to write, if everything is absolutely hunky-dory. Writing only happens when something's wrong. If everyone on earth was happy, they wouldn't write anything except recipes and postcards, and there wouldn't be any books, or literature, or libraries."