Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #14909 in Books
• Published on: 2000-11-25
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 176 pages

Amazon.com Review
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

From Publishers Weekly
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.

From Library Journal
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.

Customer Reviews

An uncommon book
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.

a chronicle of a love affair with books
What this is is a collection of essays about books: reading them, shelving them, collecting them, etc. etc. It's a chronicle of a love affair with books.

Almost every essay struck a chord with me: reading a car manual because there was nothing else to read (done that), playing word games as a child (yes), compulsive proof-reading of menus and signs (definitely), etc.

I laughed aloud at the essay on plagiarism (no, not a funny topic, normally) with its overabundance of footnotes. And a light bulb went on when I read the essay on the difference between courtly and carnal love of books: I've always felt vaguely guilty for not keeping my books in pristine condition--I eat while reading, read in the bath, leave them lying around, and my best-loved books are all mostly falling apart from being read and re-read. Turns out I'm in good company.

The only thing I had to overlook was what felt like a prejudice toward reading only classic literature. But honestly, I'd expected that. A book of essays about books is not likely to be written (or perhaps it's just not likely to be published) by an avid reader of contemporary genre fiction.

In a lot of respects, it's quite similar to Eats, Shoots and Leaves. They're both written solely for people who share the author's point of view, and quite probably feel pretentious and elitist to anyone who doesn't.

The Joy of Book Fondling Beautifully Expressed
Anne Fadiman is clearly one of us! If you, too, are among those who proofread and correct everything from restaurant menus to outdoor advertising, you'll love Fadiman's essay "Inset a Carrot" (with corrections, of course). A few years ago while visiting Monterey, California, I found myself finishing John Steinbeck's Canary Row. Later, when I read Fadiman's essay "You Are There," I realized there are many others who have experienced the thrill of You-Are-There Reading. If you're a book fondler, or if you love words, you'll enjoy Anne Fadiman's Ex Libris -- gracefully written and intelligently witty.