Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader - Hardcover

Fadiman, Anne

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374148600 ISBN 13: 9780374148607

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998

Synopsis

Anne Fadiman is--by her own admission--the sort of person who learned about sex from her father's copy of Fanny Hill, whose husband buys her 19 pounds of dusty books for her birthday, and who once found herself poring over her roommate's 1974 Toyota Corolla manual because it was the only written material in the apartment that she had not read at least twice.
This witty collection of essays recounts a lifelong love affair with books and language. For Fadiman, as for many passionate readers, the books she loves have become chapters in her own life story. Writing with remarkable grace, she revives the tradition of the well-crafted personal essay, moving easily from anecdotes about Coleridge and Orwell to tales of her own pathologically literary family. As someone who played at blocks with her father's 22-volume set of Trollope ("My Ancestral Castles") and who only really considered herself married when she and her husband had merged collections ("Marrying Libraries"), she is exquisitely well equipped to expand upon the art of inscriptions, the perverse pleasures of compulsive proof-reading, the allure of long words, and the satisfactions of reading out loud. There is even a foray into pure literary gluttony--Charles Lamb liked buttered muffin crumbs between the leaves, and Fadiman knows of more than one reader who literally consumes page corners. Perfectly balanced between humor and erudition, Ex Libris establishes Fadiman as one of our finest contemporary essayists.

About this title

About the Author

Anne Fadiman is the editor of The American Scholar. Her first book, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, was published by FSG in 1997. She lives in New York City.

Reviews

The author of last year's NBCC-winning The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, has collected 18 essays about her relationships with books, reading, writing and words. Gathered from the "Common Reader" column Fadiman wrote for Civilization magazine, these essays are all inspired by interesting ideas?how spouses merge their large libraries, the peculiar pleasures of reading mail-order catalogues, the joys of reading aloud, how people inscribe their books and why. Unfortunately, some of these fascinating ideas grow fussy. The minutiae of the shelving arrangements at the Fadiman household brings the reader to agree with the author's husband, who "seriously contemplated divorce" when she begged him to keep Shakespeare's plays in chronological order. The aggressive verbal games waged in Fadiman's (as in Clifton) family are similarly trying: They watched G.E. College Bowl, almost always beating the TV contestants; they compete to see who can find the most typos on restaurant menus; and adore obscure words such as "goetic" (pertaining to witchcraft). At least the author is self-aware: "I know what you may be thinking. What an obnoxious family! What a bunch of captious, carping, pettifogging little busybodies!" Well, yes, but Fadiman's writing, particularly in her briefer essays, is lively and sparkling with earthy little surprises: William Kunstler enjoyed writing (bad) sonnets, John Hersey plagiarized from Fadiman's mother. Books are madeleines for Fadiman, and like those pastries, these essays are best when just nibbled one or two at a time.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Award-winning journalist and editor Fadiman (The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, 1997) comes from a bookish family (her father is Clifton Fadiman). And part of the charm of these collected personal essays about books and book-loving is the way she adhesively, casually, playfully chronicles her family through its books and bibliomania. An essay about the devoted reader's compulsive love of proofreading opens novelistically with the Fadiman parents and their adult children sitting down to a restaurant dinner and, as their preferred first course, passionately - helplessly? - correcting the menu's typos. As a reporter who is here making a transition to the first-person essayist's voice, Fadiman (also the new editor of the American Scholar) maintains a sparkling sense of story, whether the stories tell us about her or about someone else. And her book shows an impish range in subject. In ``Never Do That to a Book,'' she comments on hard uses made of books: how we're wont to scribble in them, even teethe on them. ``My Odd Shelf'' discusses that part of a bibliomaniac's library dedicated to the anomalous fervent hobby (for George Orwell, it was ``ladies' magazines from the 1860s, which he liked to read in his bathtub.'' Fadiman's own odd shelf holds volumes about the history of polar explorations, and she retells some of these sagas in admirably vivid and unadorned style. At times, the origin of the essays as commissioned pieces for the author's column in Civilization magazine does restrict their scope: they seem too brief, glib, coy, or intellectually unventuresome. As a self-described romantic whose imagination lauds the Victorians and seems jovially (and delightfully) anachronistic, Fadiman comes across sometimes as an escapist unwilling to examine the terms of her escape or to question them. Instead, she's intelligently entertained by books - and she's entertaining. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

In this delightful collection of essays, Fadiman, the award-winning author of The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down (LJ 9/1/97) and the new editor of The American Scholar, ponders on "how we maintain our connections with our old books, the ones we have lived with for years, the ones whose textures and colors and smells have become as familiar to us as our children's skin." Drawn from Fadiman's "Common Reader" column in Civilization magazine, these 18 pieces wittily explore her family's bibliomania. (Her father, Clifton Fadiman, was a founder of the Book of the Month Club.) From describing the trauma of marrying her personal library with her husband's ("my books and his books had become our books") to detailing the joy of browsing second-hand bookstores ("seven hours later, we emerged...carrying nineteen pounds of books"), Fadiman writes with an appealing warmth and humor. Highly recommended for bibliolaters and bibliophiles everywhere.?Wilda Williams, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Fadiman, author of the award-winning The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down , has selected 18 book-related essays from her cache of "Common Reader" columns written for Civilization magazine to create a tribute to her love of the printed word. The first essay discloses the most intimate act of her marriage: the commingling of her and her husband's libraries. Having established just how seriously she takes books, Fadiman goes on to reveal the depths of her fascination with "odd" books and out-of-favor words, and the habit of "reading books in the places they describe." Her accounts often focus on family traits, including a compulsion to proofread everything from menus to the daily newspapers, and a craving for reading that must be satisfied in emergencies with anything at hand, such as the yellow pages or appliance instructions. As delectable and witty as these divulgences are, it is Fadiman's profound appreciation and knowledge of books and all that they convey that hit home. Donna Seaman

Edition details

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0374148600
• ISBN 13: 9780374148607
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 162