ex libris confessions of a common reader

This witty collection of essays recounts a lifelong love affair with books and language. Alix Wilber About the Author:īook Description Paperback. 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. 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. When you read aloud, the performance is collaborative').

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.

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.

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. 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'). Ex Libris is an extended love letter to language and to the wonders it performs. The subject matter here is lighter, but imbued with the same fine prose and big heart. 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 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.

Ex libris confessions of a common reader