The description on Susan Orlean’s author page on Goodreads says she grew up happy in the suburbs of Cleveland before spending four happy years at the University of Michigan.
So maybe I shouldn’t be surprised that Susan Orlean is one of my favorite writers to follow on social media, first on Threads and now on Bluesky and Instagram. I dumped Twitter and Threads for obvious reasons. Her posts are witty and funny, and her photos are always interesting and often fashionable. They’ve become more poignant since the Los Angeles fires in 2025.
It was Orlean’s dream to become a writer, and that dream came true. She’s been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1992. She’s written two bestsellers, The Orchid Thief and The Library Book. The Orchid Thief was adapted into the film Adaptation, and Meryl Streep won a Golden Globe for her portrayal of Orlean.
My first encounter with Orlean was The Library Book. I couldn’t put it down until I finished it, and then I listened to it.
Rave reviews like The Guardian‘s drew me to The Library Book, which was a Washington Post Top 10 Book of the Year and a New York Times Notable Book of 2018.
The Library Book is about the Los Angeles Central Library fire and the mystery of how it started. That’s an interesting topic, but Orlean is one of the few writers who could turn it into a New York Times bestseller. Her prose blazes as she delves into the fire and the investigation, then broadens the scope to libraries in general and the history of the Central Library. I was living in LA when the book came out and visited the Central Library downtown, a building that’s as much a work of art as it is a wonderful library.
At one time in my life, I visited my hometown library daily. The librarians were professional and friendly, and I got to know the library’s regulars as well: the homeless, the dangerous, the friendly senior citizens, the students, the lonely, and the families. There’s no place like a library to sit, read, escape, learn, and discover.
The Orchid Thief reflects Orlean’s idiosyncratic choice of topics. This time it’s the burning passion of John Laroche, who is determined to clone the rare ghost orchid, Dendrophylax lindenii.
Orlean dives into the world of orchid collecting, and the New York Times Book Review described the book as “stylishly written, whimsical yet sophisticated, quirkily detailed and full of empathy . . . The Orchid Thief shows [Orlean’s] gifts in full bloom.”
A fascinating essayist and journalist, Orlean has also written a biography of Rin Tin Tin, and her collection The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup profiles extraordinary people such as the bullfighter Cristina Sánchez, the designer Bill Blass, and a New York taxi driver.
Another popular and surprising Orlean book is On Animals. “How we interact with animals has preoccupied philosophers, poets, and naturalists for ages,” she writes.
Keen observation, humor, elegant prose, and thorough research are common traits of Susan Orlean’s books.
Here are Susan Orlean’s books:
- The Library Book
- On Animals
- The Orchid Thief: A True Story of Beauty and Obsession
- Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend
- My Kind of Place: Travel Stories from a Woman Who’s Been Everywhere
- The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup: My Encounters With Extraordinary People
- You Are Ready For Takeoff: A Short Trip
- Saturday Night
- Lazy Little Loafers
Audiobooks:
- The Library Book
- On Animals
- The Orchid Thief: A True Story of Beauty and Obsession
- Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend
- My Kind of Place: Travel Stories from a Woman Who’s Been Everywhere
Susan Orlean Quotes:
- “The library is a gathering pool of narratives and of the people who come to find them. It is where we can glimpse immortality; in the library, we can live forever.”
— Susan Orlean (The Library Book) - “Destroying a culture’s books is sentencing it to something worse than death: It is sentencing it to seem as if it never lived.”
— Susan Orlean (The Library Book) - “Writing a book, just like building a library, is an act of sheer defiance. It is a declaration that you believe in the persistence of memory.”
— Susan Orlean (The Library Book) - “I have come to believe that books have souls—why else would I be so reluctant to throw one away?”
— Susan Orlean (The Library Book) - “If you had really loved something, wouldn’t a little bit of it always linger?”
— Susan Orlean (The Orchid Thief) - “I suppose I do have one embarrassing passion- I want to know what it feels like to care about something passionately.”
— Susan Orlean (The Orchid Thief) - “In times of trouble, libraries are sanctuaries.”
— Susan Orlean (The Library Book) - “Sometimes I think I’ve figured out some order in the universe, but then I find myself in Florida”
— Susan Orlean (The Orchid Thief) - “There where one burns books, one in the end burns men.”
— Susan Orlean (The Library Book) - “books are the last things that any human being can afford to do without.”
— Susan Orlean (The Library Book) - “I don’t like hiking with convicts carrying machetes.”
— Susan Orlean (The Orchid Thief) - “Country living—and definitely living in the country with a lot of animals—isn’t peaceful. It’s full of blood and guts and murder and rivalry and treachery and chaos, in a lovely green pitiless world.”
— Susan Orlean (Animalish) - “I know now that even though dogs break your heart, they fill it up, even when they’re gone.”
— Susan Orlean (On Animals) - “The art critic and philosopher John Berger once said that we like to look at animals because it reminds us of the past and the agrarian life that included the regular presence of animals.”
— Susan Orlean (Animalish)
Find books by Susan Orlean on Audiobooks, Amazon/Audible, and Bookstores who are not Amazon.
You also might be interested in Rebecca Solnit’s Books.
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