Running the Books: The Adventures of an Accidental Prison Librarian

I picked up this Audible book because I thought I might learn something about living and workiing in a prison. The book turned out to be a memoir of a Jewish Harvard graduate and his two years "behind bars" as a prison librarian. You will, however, learn more about prison life and the lives of prisoners than you would expect from a memoir. So I use the term lightly. That said, this is an informative, entertaining, thoughtful, and often funny description of life behind bars. The writing is crisp and the reading of Dustin Rubin is terrific. The book is worth the time for the character studies alone. Enjoy.

I had high hopes for this story. Unfortunately that's as far as it got. I found the writing to be sophomoric and overall a story that stayed at the surface. I never became involved with any of the characters or knew enough about them to care very much what happened to them. I was left wondering what the authors purpose was when he wrote this. It wasn't funny enough to be humorous or introspective enough to make you think about anything deep. Not awful but I'd never recommend it to a friend or relisten to it.

Vibrant story about the life and times of an Ivy educated dude that scored a job as a librarian in a Boston city jail. Some interesting twists and turns, highs and lows.

I listened to a little more than half of this one and gave up. It didn't hold my attention.

A first effort. Are we trying to hard to make the inmates funny? Not funny? Scary to a Jewish kid? Is this about being Jewish in a jail library? Sorry, writing rather college level - lots of unnecessary adjectives. Too big a thesaurus.

This books reads like a high school kids account of "how I spent my summer vacation," except that it covers a longer period of time and, astoundingly, the boring author is a Harvard graduate from whom one might have expected more. The narration is painfully slow and with little or no entertainment value ... to paraphrase it as "adventures" is misleading ... There were no adventures .. just this over-educated kid narrrating too much detail and not enough pesonality. Oh he tried, but his background as a newpaper obituary writer must have overtaken other skills ... I thought I would die waiting for something interesting, compelling, or emotionally charged to happen. No dice. Save your time and $ .. the description reads better than the book.