Ex Libris : Confessions of a Common Reader
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Perfectly balanced between humor and erudition, Ex Libris establishes Anne Fadiman as one of our finest contemporary essayists.
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.
Customer Reviews
Intimate and Articulate
“Books are so often written about as if they are toasters,” Anne Fadiman laments in the preface to Ex Libris. “This model of readers as consumers […] neatly omits what I consider the heart of reading: not whether we wish to purchase a new book but 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.” It is to my utter regret that I have not had the many years required to form such a connection with Ex Libris. Still, my experience with this book is reminiscent of one of those rare, exhilarating instances where you meet a new person and instantly know they will become your life-long friend. Ex Libris is full of intimate warmth and articulate wit that draws you in and wraps around you, like the big green reading chair by your grandmother’s fire during the holidays. This book, in its exploration of what makes reading so immensely joyful, inspires the very sense of bibliophilic splendor which Fadiman so articulately investigates. I began reading this book on my Kindle, but halfway through, I was overcome by the intrinsic desire to taste the romance of physical pages, and I purchased a physical copy for me to complete. Had I been in a more romantic mood and in possession of slightly more time, I would have scoured the local bookstores for a copy, but considering the length of time since this book was originally published, I suspect my efforts would have been unsuccessful. Ultimately, Anne Fadiman constructs a celebratory self-portrait of a life lived as a “common reader,” drenching the pages with the warm, thick syrup of bibliophilic love, a work that I suspect will haunt my both my shelves and beside table for many decades to come.