During the Holdiays, as I am wont to do, I went to some bookstores to stock up on reading material for the first part of the new year. When I went into Books a Million, I saw an end cap with some recent books for 60% off. I perused the shelf, picking up a newer copy of Toni Morrison’s Beloved for my daughter and Mariann Edgar Budde’s How We Learn to Be Brave: Decisive Moments in Life and Faith, which I read and thoroughly enjoyed over the course of two days. Along with those two books, I saw Hika Harada’s Dinner at the Night Library. The title, coupled with the cover showing a dissection of the Night Library with a woman at a bookshelf and a man eating at a table, immediately caught my attention, and after reading the description of the book on the inside cover, I bought it.

Dinner at the Night Library focuses on Otoha Higuchi, a young woman who wants nothing more than to work with books. She gets hired at the Night Library, a library that houses the book collections of famous writers after they die and that allows the public to come in and read the books all between the hours of seven at night to midnight. I don’t want to give anything away about Harada’s novel because its joy comes through following Otoha as she starts working at the Night Library and the people she meets along the way. The novel, essentially, is a rumination on reading and the power of books, and with that in mind, I want to look at a couple of scenes in the novel where these themes arise.

In one section, the thirty-three year old manage of the library, Yuzuru Sasai, details how his aunt started the library. His aunt tells him about how books can inform you about a person from their interests to their beliefs and what they value in life. She tells Yuzuru, “Talk with a person about the books they read, and you can tell what sort of person they are.” Yuzuru’s dismisses his aunt’s assertion, and when he says he’s not sure about her statement, she tells him, “Then you take a look at their bookshelves. A person’s desires are crammed into their bookshelf. Look at that and you can tell what kind of person they want to become.” Yuzuru’s aunt points out that in order to understand someone, we must understand what they read.

Whenever I go to someone’s house, I immediately look around and see what books reside on the shelves. Looking at the spines displayed on the shelves, I get a feel, especially if I don’t know the person well, about what topics to possibly discuss and what topics to possibly avoid. I also get a sense of that person’s interests and what they desire, as Yuzuru’s aunt puts it, “what kind of person they want to become.” This reconnaissance, if you will, serves as a way to engage with someone before in depth conversation because the books, the decor, and other factors, communicate to me what the person values and their beliefs. Even though I am just looking around the room, I am reminded of the fact that 90% of our communication with one another in nonverbal, specifically through body language and our tone of voice, and I would add things like books and other items to that list.

Elsewhere in the novel, one of the workers, Minami, shares with us the fact that she has worked in librares her entire adult life but she does not enjoy reading. She cannot escape into a book, and reading, for her, has become merely a chore for her job, something that no longer brings her pleasure. She tells her coworkers, “It’s not like I’m dissatisfied with working here. . . . But the thing is, I realized maybe I don’t really like books all that much. I can’t get excited as all of you do over books or novels. So I think it might be better to let someone else do my job.” Masako tells her that librarians don’t need to like books, but that they are there to provide assistance and a calm hand to patrons. Minami wants to recapture her joy for reading, the joy of being able to talk about books with others for hours, reveling in the worlds they create that we, as readers, then inhabit.

Dinner at the Night Library is a book about reading. It’s a book about libraries and the importance of libraries. At the advent of the Internet, public consensus surroounded the “demcratizing” impact of the Internet, its ability to disseminate knowledge and thus break down physical boundaries of class, nation, and other barriers. However, we have found this to be a false reality. Libraries, on the other hand, do just that, providing access to knowledge, through books, to everyone, and providing access to much-needed services and programs to everyone in a community.

Writing about the construction of the first library in Philadelphia, Benjamin Franklin pointed out the ways that opening individuals’ access to knowledge helped to level the disparities between individuals. He proclaimed, “These libraries have improved the general conversation of the Americans, made the common tradesmen and farmers as intelligent as most gentlemen from other countries, and perhaps have contributed in some degree to the stand so generally made throughout the colonies in defense of their privileges.” Franklin notes that no matter one’s class, they have access to the information contained within the walls of the public library, a space funded by the community, for the community. This flattening of society allows the poor boy to read and learn alongside the gentry.

Likewise, James Truslow Adams, when coining the term American Dream in his 1931 book The Epic of America, observed the same thing as he gazed down on the reading room at the Library of Congress. He wrote, “As one looks down on the general reading room, which alone contains ten thousand volumes which may be read without even the asking, one sees the seats filled with silent readers, old and young, rich and poor, black and white, the executive and the laborer, the general and the private, the noted scholar and the schoolboy, all reading at their own library provided by their own democracy. It has always seemed to me the perfect concrete example of the American dream.”

The Night Library does the same thing. It brings people in contact with their favorite authors and provides them with access to those authors’ own collections, allowing patrons to access the knowledge and information that the authors accessed. It democratizes knowledge. It also, since it focuses on novelists, allows people the chance to escape reality, if only for a little while, into fabulous realms that help illuminate our own existence. Dinner at the Night Library explores all of this in a way that makes us, as readers, think about the very act of reading and the ways we collect our own lives and thoughts through books.

What are your thoughts? Have you done unessay projects in class? Are you thinking about it? As usual, let me know in the comments below. Make sure to follow me on Bluesky @silaslapham.bsky.social‬.