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S'està carregant… Ex-libris : confessions d'una lectora (1998)de Anne Fadiman
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» 12 més Bibliomemoirs (2) Five star books (107) Female Author (250) Top Five Books of 2013 (1,027) Books Read in 2016 (803) Favourite Books (875) Books Read in 2017 (2,353) Books Read in 2018 (3,265) No hi ha cap discussió a Converses sobre aquesta obra. A lovely little collection of essays about the odd intersections between reading and everyday life, where Fadiman talks about how we organise books in our homes (or not), how we acquire them and pass them on, how we mistreat them, how we read aloud or are read to, how the books on our parents' shelves can be raw material for building forts or a reference source in the quest for sexual enlightenment, and so on. There's a silly piece that purports to show that no-one has ever written anything original about plagiarism, and a rueful look at the joys of finding errors in restaurant menus and of writing bad but perfectly-iambic sonnets. Nothing life-changing, but probably a good book to slip into the Christmas stocking of any book-addict too young to have read it when it first came out. This a series of essays about the author's experience reading books and building library. The essays are mostly pleasing to read, because the author writes well, and the author has an interesting family who share her love of reading. Actually it's obvious the author and her family are extremely intelligent, educated, and privileged. They've read everything and know everything. They attended Ivy League schools and hold accomplished careers are authors or journalists. It's kind of like watching Big Bang Theory except this book is about nerdy bookworms instead of nerdy physicists. My favorite essay is the one on how the author worked on combining her book collection with her husband's and how aggravating it was for her. Another fun essay is the one in which the author read a book that included 19 words she didn't know, and she got very obsessed with it because....I guess it's an unusual experience for her, so she surveyed friends and family on whether they know these 19 words. And she extensively wrote about how well they did. Very quirky! Nice collection essays about reading, books, libraries and the joy of used books. Each essay picks a different aspect of the bibliophile and are of consistently high quality. I found that reading them one at a time, spread amongst my other reading to be the most satisfying way to approach the book. I picked this up based on a recommendation and abandoned it about 75% in. I'm a sucker for books about books, bookshops, or libraries, both fiction and otherwise. But this one: no, thank you. The essays on how books are central and essential to the author's childhood, life, relationships, marriage are very well-written. The author has a droll sense of humor that emerges here and there. But. This is a person who takes herself, her reading, even the way in which she displays her books in her personal library Very Seriously. Let's just say the idea of enjoying a beach read or the pleasures of Sweet Valley High or thrill in the forbidden fruits of Flowers in the Attic would be so far out of this person's orbit as to be in an other galaxy altogether. The only thing that saves this from being completely pretentious, elitist, and insufferable is that the author's love of her books, her parents/brother, and her husband come through clearly and genuinely. Without that, this would completely drown under the weight of its literary self-importance.
The book is a modest, charming, lighthearted gambol among the stacks. It serves up neither ideas nor theories but anecdotes about the joys of collecting and reading books. A terribly entertaining collection of personal essays about books, reading, language, and the endearing pathologies of those who love books. Witty, enchanting and supremely well-written... One of the most delightful volumes to have come across my desk in a long while, a book of essays in celebration of bibliophilia that will appeal to anyone who's ever tootled about in a secondhand bookshop and who loves books. These 18 stylish, dryly humorous essays... pay tribute to the joys of reading, the delights of language, and the quirks (yes there are a few) of fellow bibliophiles... A charmingly uncommon miscellany on literary love. It is not just that she is erudite (which she is), or that an outlandish word will send her to the dictionary (which it will). It's that a book will set her pulses racing, whether it's Livy's account of the battle of Lake Trasimene or Beatrix Potter's "The Story of the Fierce Bad Rabbit." More to the point, perhaps. she can set ours racing too. Inspirat en
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. No s'han trobat descripcions de biblioteca. |
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![]() GèneresClassificació Decimal de Dewey (DDC)814.54 — Literature English (North America) American essays 20th Century 1945-1999LCC (Clas. Bibl. Congrés EUA)ValoracióMitjana:![]()
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Fadiman started her life as a bibliophile by using her father's books for building blocks, and has come around to writing her own, for which we should all be grateful.
Review written November 2007 (