by Michiko Aoyama (translated by Alison Watts)
I passed on a review of this book to Rozanna, my library colleague and friend (and former resident of Japan!), who read it first and then enthusiastically recommended it back to me. It would be every librarian’s dream to be this intuitive about what a library patron really needs to read, for their own sake. We all learned about the “reference interview” in library school, but somehow master librarian Sayuri Komachi reads deeply between the lines of those conversations and finds even metaphorical nourishment for her patrons. If you love to read and are a library user, you will find this story so charming and its setting in Japan quirky and interesting. Its cover trumpets that it is an “international best-seller,” and I can see why!