Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader by Anne Fadiman
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Book Reviews of Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader
Book Review: An uncommon book
Summary: 4 Stars
If your dwelling is overflowing with books and you "order with one click" regularly, you'll probably be enchanted by Ex Libris. The author writes with wit and charm about words, language and books--sorting and classifying them, trying to dispose of them, and loving them too well. If you're a compulsive proofreader and a literary glutton, you'll meet a soulmate here. Fadiman's "confessions" are little essays and most are little gems. Occasionally an idea seems forced, like a restaurant dish with ingredients that don't quite mesh, but most of the time you'll savor each simile, metaphor and phrase.Book Review: Great book for book lovers.
Summary: 4 Stars
A book to read and enjoy for people for whom books have always been a part of their lives. If books are generally exchanged in your family for XMas and birthdays, fathers days and mothers days, you will find something in this book for you.Book Review: Read, think, smile
Summary: 3 Stars
What a captivating and fun little book! I don't attach to it the same deep meanings that some of my fellow reviewers did, but there is plenty here that any true book lover will identify with and enjoy.I found the book a bit uneven -- we've all read enough bad poetry to want to avoid reading about flawed verse in the chapter called Scorn Not the Sonnet, and while the point is well made in Nothing New Under the Sun, I felt I was going to suffocate under the weight of all those footnotes. But where Ex Libris is good it is very good.
On this book's pages, you'll find charming anecdotes about messages written inside book covers, funny stories about people compelled to proofread at all time, an essay on the joy of reading a book in the place it is about, and a little stab at the annoying practice of removing the gender from popular sayings. Every one a gem.
This is also a handsome edition of the book, making it a great gift for any book lovers you know. It's an even better gift to yourself.
Book Review: A great book about...books
Summary: 3 Stars
If you adore reading, you will soon find yourself wrapped up in the essays that compose this book by Anne Fadiman. Not only do we get to see her love of books, but we see how her upbringing brought along this love and the how she rears her children to embrace books as she and her husband do. The reader is swept up in Anne's conversational way of describing from things that irk her (in an essay about correct punctuation) to the emotional task of trying to merge her and her husband's libraries. Over the course of the 18 essays I found I almost enjoyed them all. One or two essays seemed a bit out of place, but for the most part, I just wished it was longer. :)Book Review: Material for the "Odd Shelf"
Summary: 2 Stars
In my opinion, the one redeeming chapter in this book belongs on the "odd shelf" of the book. It relays the story of the author's fascination with the untameable breadth and mystery of the Antarctic, and the even greater mystery of those who would seek to explore and overcome its caustic yet captivating terrain.
This chapter offered a rare moment in the heart of this contrivedly witty, cute but unconsciously trite account of the author's supreme relation to books and literature. It was the one chapter in which the annoyingly self-aggrandizing and (unsuccessfully) "common" pretense of the narrative voice opened up into a reflection far greater than the usual smart self-awareness and approving, pat-on-the-back revelation; here the tone, the narrative opened up into scintillating wonder of the "other" in the text, the "object" of Fadiman's reading rather than the subject (herself): the Antarctic explorers who strived and failed and endured insane extremities, motivated by a mystery that the author cannot seem to reduce to one of her many smart but smirky witticisms (though she tries at the end of the chapter, but here we tend to brush off the bizzare triteness of her concluding words, being so captivated as we are at the end of her sharp and wonder-inducing account of these fearless Arctic explorers).
Aside from the wonderful and well crafted trip to a far away place that this chapter offers, I found myself floundering through this maddeningly self-featuring narrative, wondering whether I should stop now before I was overcome by irritation and tempted not to pick up another book again, or to continue reading and let my feelings of annoyance build and deepen in some twistedly cathartic way. Here is a set of essays that attempts to evoke the "common" joy and passion for books and for all things literary, but ends up, instead, basking in an unpalatable celebration of one particular reader's (the author's) quizzical literacy.