I’m old enough to remember the days when, to find a book at the local library, you would be referred to the card catalog.
Often housed in vintage wooden cases and jammed tightly together, these typed—and sometimes handwritten—cards carried series of numbers, titles, authors, and brief descriptions of shelved books to be found in the labyrinth of thousands of books, all carefully catalogued and each in their place.
Books play an important role in author Celeste Ng’s latest novel, “Our Missing Hearts: A Novel.” Her characters are influenced by ideas and words.
In Search of the Truth
Young 12-year-old Bird Gardner lives a quiet existence with his father, a former linguist who works at the university library shelving books. Bird knows that his Chinese-American mother was a poet, but he is unfamiliar with her work and doesn’t care, as she was lost to them when he was 9 years old….