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Wes Boomgaarden

Posted on | October 7, 2009 | 302 views |

Wes Boomgaarden is associate professor and preservation officer in the University Libraries. He recently completed his assignment as project lead in the renovation of the Thompson Library. In October he’ll celebrate the completion of his 25th year here at Ohio State.

What are your five favorite books and why?
The response to this question probably changes every year or so for most people, including me. Right now, I’d rank my top six as these:

Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl
This book is well-known in some circles but unknown by many. To me the book is epitomized by this quotation from Frankl, a Holocaust survivor: “Everything can be taken from a man but … the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”


American Pastoral by Phillip Roth
So good a novel that I read it again right after I finished it the first time. To me it was the story of a very likeable Job, but without the happy ending.

The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
A novel told from the point of view of a mother and four daughters of a missionary family in the Belgian Congo in 1959. I was captivated by the intertwining of these females’ description of the doomed and self-righteous missionary father in the story.

Yale Book of Quotations edited by Fred Shapiro
Full of great modern selections and a very enjoyable way to spend an hour — for weeks on end.

Stengel: His Life and Times by Robert Creamer
The funniest biography — of baseball legend or anyone else — that I’ve ever read.

Class by Paul Fussell
A quick analysis of the American class system, with truths certain to entertain (or offend) almost anybody in America. I’ve loaned my copy of this books to probably 20 friends — and I always have gotten it returned to me!

What is the last book you’ve bought?
I recently bought Markus Zusaks’ The Book Thief as a gift for my daughter’s 21st birthday.  However, for myself, with the great library resources here in Columbus — from Ohio State, Columbus Metropolitan Library and OhioLINK — I borrow nearly everything I ever want to read and buy very few books.

What “important book” have you not read and why haven’t you read it?
I have started to read Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude about six times, and have yet to get halfway through it. What’s wrong with me? Well, yes, I plan to give it another try one day soon.

What books have helped you most in your career?
Nicholson Baker’s Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper had a big effect on me professionally just after it was published. Baker’s work — a non-fiction exposé — got many in my specialized field of library materials preservation quite riled up. But in looking back on it now, and with all the problems we face now as a society, the topic seems so much less important.

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