Paper and Fire (Great Library #2) by Rachel Caine

Jess, Khalila, Glain and Dario are now working for the Library – but working knowing that their lives hang by a thread and the Archivist is just looking for an excuse. While the last members of their group – Morgan and Thomas – are imprisoned. Morgan fights for freedom – and Thomas may be already dead.

Together they need to free their friends and somehow escape the Library’s incredible power and reach

I am just going to repeat all my endless praise for the world building of this book that I said during the first book review of Ink and Bone. Because it’s still awesome

I do love how the characters look on their battles with the library. Because they don’t want to destroy it, they don’t want to bring it down. They want, desperately, passionately, for the Library to be what it should be – the excellent, shining force for good. It should be this place which can protect knowledge, spread knowledge and advance the whole world. We have wonderful looks back into the past where the Library stood against all kinds of discrimination (as I’ll come to, the cast is wonderfully diverse), where the Library passionately resisted control of nations for the sake of knowledge for its own sake.

But despite all that they have come a long way from those original routes. As the Library became more and more about power. Defending Library independence from national control has changed to them outright taking over, destroying and controlling nations in the name of Library Power. We find whole stashes of books they are not only hording, but actively suppressing (we learn that the printing press has pretty much been invented dozens of times over centuries and each time has been viciously suppressed by the Library – Thomas and Wolfe are not the only ones by a long way. After all, the press is a relatively simple invention).

Through this, in some ways, even the enemies they fight are not entirely demonised. They horde those books even though they’d ban them and not read them – because even then destroying them is an anathema to everything they stand for. They legitimately think they’re a force for good even as their actions in the name of that good go ever darker. Which is why the whole struggle of the gang not WANTING to burn it all down – but desperately wanting to make it better.

Ink and Bone (Great Library #1) by Rachel Caine

The Great Library of Alexandria was never burnt and, more, has spread across the entire world. Part religion, part supreme national body, its power is unquestioned.

Jess Brightwell is a book smuggler, from a family of book smugglers. His entrance into the Library as a scholar was initially planned to be a way for his family to get access to more and precious books

But while going through the vigorous training procedure to join the Library, his already complicated loyalty becomes stressed. Something which doesn’t get simpler as he learns some of the Library’s many secrets – and the length which the Library will go to protect those secrets and its global control.

Well that was a surprise – I didn’t expect something nearly as unique and original as this.

The whole idea of the Great Library surviving, of it becoming a major international force, charged with the maintenance, protection and furthering of knowledge is really well done. This creates a whole different world – not just politically with the Great library being like a world religion with its own laws, army and rules – but with a different world map all based on how the Great Library has radically changed society. And it’s not just the map, it’s also how people think. The library has an almost religious significance, recording your personal thoughts in your journal to be kept in the library after your death has become both a funerary rite and an incredibly important ritual to people – to the extent that even armies at war will keep emergency reserve journals for people to fill in. The whole idea of reading one of those journals has become almost a sacrilege

Actual books have become incredible precious objects of such value because of the power of the library and the purpose knowledge has. A whole black market as built around it – precious actual books and what they represent compared the alchemical copies that the library produces – temporary copies that anyone can read, beamed to specially prepared blank books.

Not only does this fascinating world setting serve as an excellent backdrop, but through it we also see the excellent depiction of how this well meaning organisation can be corrupted. How the promotion of knowledge – even pushing forward thinking ideas for the time like educating women. Because the library was about learning, preserving and spreading knowledge. And how easily the “spread” of knowledge becomes the “control” of knowledge – again, the good intentions are really clear there: The idea that knowledge has to stay in Library control – because if information is spread willy-nilly, well, who can be sure if it’s true or right? Or maybe dangerous? Maybe its lies? Maybe is should be kept secret? Maybe it’s dangerous?