Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader

Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader
by Anne Fadiman

Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader
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Book Summary Information

Author: Anne Fadiman
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2000-11-25
ISBN: 0374527229
Number of pages: 162
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Book Reviews of Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader

Book Review: Books, wonderful books.
Summary: 5 Stars

It is Christmas, and the very best gifts of all I can get are books. I never get as many as I am hoping for, so after Christmas a visit to the bookstores in my Norwegian hometown is a must. And this year will be as all others, though this year is also a little special. A good friend gave me Anne Fadiman's Ex Libris, and reading this book gives me a double reason to browse the bookstores the coming week.
The book contains 18 essays about book loving, and is written by a person with a deep love of books. If you don't love books before reading this book ,I'm sure after reading it you will follow me on my book tour. The essays range from the story where Anne tells us how her book collection marries her husband's, it tells about different ways to treat books and she tells us about her origins, a family of book lovers.

I have always made dog ears in my books, and felt a little bad about it, how can I treat my beloved books this way, now suddenly I can see that I'm not alone, and still I can call myself a book lover. Books are to be used, the more the book shows it is used, the more it has been loved. In one of her essays Fadiman tells about Thomas Babington Macaulay and the way he reads books about the places he visits while he actually is there. Anne, you and Macaulay have another soulmate here in middle Norway. When I travel my suitcase is always so heavy I almost can't carry it. And what else in life can be compared to reading Johanny Spyri's Heidi for your daughters when actually visiting the town, reading Victor Hugo on a goat down the Seine, or The Road to Asmara, while sitting in a cafe in Asmara, the capitol of Eritrea. My Christmas reading this year contains (among others) of Kristin Lavransdatter by Sigrid Undset, and when visiting the Nidaros Cathedral this Christmas Day I had to bring a big purse to bring with me the book where Kristin visited this Christchurch of Nidaros.

We moved a couple of months ago. With a family of six it was wonderful to move to a bigger house, but there are fewer bookshelves here (at least so far). I have a book collection of several thousand books, and have now, for some weeks tried to go through the collection to see which books I can give away - oh, a terrible job. Anne Fadiman has through Ex Libris showed me that I can keep all my books, and even buy more, there is only a question of enough shelves, or fantasy enough to find other places for your books. I will still give away books, I will not be without the pleasure I see in other people's faces when I show them my boxes with books to be given away, and they can take when they want. But I will also still buy books. I can't live without them, and I'm sure I have fantasy enough to find room for them.

Must end my review now, it is time to read a book or two for my fine year old daughter.

Britt Arnhild Lindland, Norway

Summary of Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader

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.

The subtitle of Anne Fadiman's slim collection of essays is Confessions of a Common Reader, but if there is one thing Fadiman is not, it's common. In her previous work of nonfiction, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, she brought both skill and empathy to her balanced exploration of clashing cultures and medical tragedy. The subject matter here is lighter, but imbued with the same fine prose and big heart. Ex Libris is an extended love letter to language and to the wonders it performs. Fadiman is a woman who loves words; in "The Joy of Sesquipedalians" (very long words), she describes an entire family besotted with them: "When I was growing up, not only did my family walk around spouting sesquipedalians, but we viewed all forms of intellectual competition as a sacrament, a kind of holy water as it were, to be slathered on at every opportunity." From very long words it's just a short jump to literature, and Fadiman speaks joyfully of books, book collecting, and book ownership ("In my view, nineteen pounds of old books are at least nineteen times as delicious as one pound of fresh caviar"). In "Marrying Libraries" Fadiman describes the emotionally fraught task of merging her collection with her husband's: "After five years of marriage and a child, George and I finally resolved that we were ready for the more profound intimacy of library consolidation. It was unclear, however, how we were to find a meeting point between his English-garden approach and my French-garden one." Perhaps some marriages could not have stood the strain of such an ordeal, but for this one, the merging of books becomes a metaphor for the solidity of their relationship.

Over the course of 18 charming essays Fadiman ranges from the "odd shelf" ("a small, mysterious corpus of volumes whose subject matter is completely unrelated to the rest of the library, yet which, upon closer inspection reveals a good deal about its owner") to plagiarism ("the more I've read about plagiarism, the more I've come to think that literature is one big recycling bin") to the pleasures of reading aloud ("When you read silently, only the writer performs. When you read aloud, the performance is collaborative"). Fadiman delivers these essays with the expectation that her readers will love and appreciate good books and the power of language as much as she does. Indeed, reading Ex Libris is likely to bring up warm memories of old favorites and a powerful urge to revisit one's own "odd shelf" pronto. --Alix Wilber

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