I got an email from longtime 3 Booker Bo Boswell who told me he found an enticingly-titled thread on reddit called “What’s your field or study (hobbyist or professional) and what’s a cornerstone beginners book for that topic/field?”
The most upvoted reply on the thread read: "Librarian here, Susan Orlean’s ‘The Library Book’ is at first glance a true-crime book about tracking the arsonist who set fire and burned down the main library in Los Angeles, but it also gives a comprehensive glimpse into contemporary libraries and their issues, especially updating a view of them if you haven’t been inside one since you were a kid."
Bo picked up the book, loved it, and then wrote to me that "the amount of research and bizarre detail Orlean puts into her work is so engrossing.” Bizarre detail! I was convinced. I picked up ‘The Library Book’ and it blew me away. Reading it was like … wandering a library. Surprising curiosity trails at every turn. I ended up putting the book in my Best Of 2023 and then went deeper into Susan Orlean’s back catalog where I found myself reading profiles like ‘The American Man, Age 10’ and a series of fascinating but unconventional obituaries about people like the inventor of Hawaiian Tropic or the first magician on the Las Vegas strip.
I’ve come to think of Susan Orlean as one of the best non-fiction writers on the planet. She’s been a Staff Writer for ‘The New Yorker’ since 1992 and has written more than 10 bestselling books including ‘The Library Book’, ‘On Animals’, ‘Saturday Night’, and ‘The Orchid Thief’, which was turned into the movie ‘Adaptation’, starring Meryl Streep in her Oscar-nominated role as … yes, Susan Orlean.
Susan has an endless, unbridled curiosity — that ‘bizarre detail’ — which you’ll see on full display in this conversation which begins by talking about how she organizes her shoes! She’s a writer’s writer who offers us a true masterclass and always reminds us that “storytelling and knowledge-sharing is the essential human experience.”
We talk about organizing shoes and spices, what books do that nothing else does, finding the balance between professional and amateur, the genius of container ships, what great book design does, how to cultivate your writing voice, how you might organize your book, facing the fear of failure, LSD, the power of libraries, Susan’s 3 most formative books, and much, much more…
I am so excited to share this conversation and hope you’ll find it as endlessly inspiring, thoughtful as I did.
Let’s jump into Chapter 134 of 3 Books now…
Chapter 134: Susan Orlean on lusty ledes and literary lessons for life
CONNECT with Susan Orlean
Susan’s 3 Books
First book (1:26:15)
Second book (1:52:21)
Third book (2:30:46)
Word Of The Chapter
WORDCLOUD OF THE CHAPTER:
Quotes
“You have an experience of the person before you actually have an experience of them.” — Susan Orlean | 3 Books Podcast
“Humanity is into taxonomy. I mean, it’s a human impulse to find and categorize and index and organize.” — Susan Orlean | 3 Books Podcast
“At the end of the day, it is a very commercial thing to cure a disease. People make money.” — Susan Orlean | 3 Books Podcast
“This human impulse to organize and categorize probably is most explicitly shown when we think about books and knowledge and information. The idea of organizing the mental output of writers throughout history and to have come up with a system that, while it's not perfect, it's withstood the test of time, but also to begin to allow us to impose some kind of order on books is pretty extraordinary.” — Susan Orlean | 3 Books Podcast
“[A book’s design] is the physical manifestation of what a book is all about.” — Susan Orlean | 3 Books Podcast
“The closeness between our human soul, as it were, and a library, and how – while the connection might not seem that obvious – the way in which a library contains dreams and knowledge and facts and history and memory, and really, the whole of human experience is much the way a person contains dreams and memories and knowledge and fantasy. We contain our own personal library of thoughts.” — Susan Orlean | 3 Books Podcast
“Many of us have had this experience of trying to remember something, and you almost feel like you’re flipping through a card catalogue. ‘No. No. Not that… That’s what I’m trying to remember!’” — Susan Orlean | 3 Books Podcast
“[Libraries] are the collective mind of a community.” — Susan Orlean | 3 Books Podcast
“Storytelling and knowledge sharing is the essential human experience. Books are just the means by which we do it. It’s how we exist together – we tell each other stories.” — Susan Orlean | 3 Books Podcast
“A book is almost like a whisper.” — Susan Orlean | 3 Books Podcast
“I don’t want to say rant – what’s the positive word for rant?” “Rant!” — Susan Orlean | 3 Books Podcast
“I felt like it was a way that I could signal the tremendous contradictions of his life without saying, wow, it's pretty weird to be a cab driver but also be king.” — Susan Orlean | 3 Books Podcast
“I’d like to feel that I’m both a professional and an amateur, in the sense that, I bring to my work, the same degree of joy and surprise that I have felt since the very beginning. And that I don’t look at as ‘just gotta make a widget.’ But when it comes to work habits and discipline, I’m very much a professional, and I’m proud of it.” — Susan Orlean | 3 Books Podcast
“I do love fiction that does that, that tells a very intimate story but in a context that is a character in its own right.” — Susan Orlean | 3 Books Podcast
“I loved [The Sound and the Fury] so much that I was rereading it while I was reading it.” — Susan Orlean | 3 Books Podcast
“Writing is very humbling. And if you think because you’ve written lots of books or written for ‘The New Yorker' or had a bestseller that the next sentence you write is going to be easy then you are sorely mistaken.” — Susan Orlean | 3 Books Podcast
“I often like being funny when I don’t have to tell a joke.” — Susan Orlean | 3 Books Podcast
“I think your ultimate goal always is to try and have your writing sound as much like your actual way of expressing yourself as possible. And that seems like a simple goal but it’s actually very challenging.” — Susan Orlean | 3 Books Podcast
“It is certainly a way to learn how to write, is to read people whose work you love, and say, I somehow want to achieve the same thing, but in my own voice.” — Susan Orlean | 3 Books Podcast
“I don’t see a conflict between having that kind of orderly drive, which I think of as ‘professional,’ and having the vulnerability and openness that an amateur might have.” — Susan Orlean | 3 Books Podcast
“[As a journalist] it doesn’t really matter what I think–although I’m not gonna hide from you what I think–but what I’m really here for is to be your Virgil and to show you this world that I’ve uncovered.” — Susan Orlean | 3 Books Podcast
“Storytelling and knowledge sharing is the essential human experience. Books are just the means by which we do it. It’s how we exist together – we tell each other stories.” — Susan Orlean | 3 Books Podcast
“It’s meaningful for us to know the way other people are living.” — Susan Orlean | 3 Books Podcast
“Finding a voice is the ultimate challenge. And I think the only helpful thing I can is that–the great surprise is discovering, it’s a little like The Wizard of Oz, that you were home all alone. Your voice is the voice you have in the world all along. And what makes writing hard is we get tense, we get self-conscious, you sometimes feel like you don’t even know how to say a simple sentence. But the truth of the matter, and I find it funny, the more experienceI have, the closer and closer it is to how I would’ve sat down and told this story to you.” — Susan Orlean | 3 Books Podcast
“There is such a clear black and white. Things are either true or they’re not true. Facts either happened or they didn’t. It just doesn’t seem hard to me to... And I think readers deserve to know that if they’re reading non-fiction... it’s factual.” — Susan Orlean | 3 Books Podcast
“It was frankly more appropriate that I never saw a Ghost Orchid, the way most of us never achieve this perfect thing that we aspire to. It also was true. I didn’t see a Ghost Orchid.” — Susan Orlean | 3 Books Podcast
“This will sound perhaps obvious, but why not: read read read, and then write and write and write. Not to take too much away from Nike, but really, if you love writing, and you want to do, you just gotta do it.” — Susan Orlean | 3 Books Podcast
Download Transcript
Show Notes
The Orchid Thief by Susan Orlean
The Library Book by Susan Orlean
Fahrenheit-451 by Ray Bradbury
Antifragile by Nassim Taleb
The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup by Susan Orlean
The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry
Hiroshima by John Hersey
Inferno/Purgatorio (Virgil as guide)
