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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.… (més)
souloftherose: Anne Fadiman comments on Gladstone's On Books and the Housing of Them in her book about books entitiled Ex Libris. Both are wonderful short books about books which would be enjoyed by most book lovers.
This was my weekend morning book, read over cups of coffee from my spot on the couch. It was the perfect companion for that early, tender part of a Saturday or Sunday - funny and interesting and gentle. I recommend this book to everyone, whole-heartedly. ( )
Yes I did roll my eyes every time she dropped a friend’s name closely followed by their snobby career title in order to make a point, but otherwise appreciated the bits written to and about her fellow “carnal common reader”.
2.75 stars. I wanted to love this book, because I love books and reading in general.
The author loves words, and the more obscure, the better, it seems. This was what turned me off the most, because it just seemed so pretentious. I'm an avid reader who reads a wide variety of genres, authors, etc., and there were a ridiculous number of words I didn't understand. Since I was reading this for fun, I didn't want to have to look up all those words in a dictionary. Suffice it to say, this isn't super layperson-friendly.
There were some stories here and there that I enjoyed, though I wasn't particularly inspired by the books or authors mentioned within. Fadiman and I have very different moral and religious beliefs, as well, so I didn't connect with her much.
There is profanity here, including the name of Christ used as an exclamation. ( )
A refreshing different look at a Book on Books, by a very bookish person from a literary family. Beautiful descriptive language, clever wording, good turns of phrase, ample literary morsels. “Americans admire success. Englishmen admire heroic failure.” p24 “Catalogues: our mailbox hatches them by spontaneous generation, I know they really are the offspring of promiscuous mailing lists, which copulate in secret and for money.” p114 Big vocabulary, I frequently looked up words. Eg sesquipedalian (polysyllabic; long word). ( )
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.
afegit per jburlinson | editaBoston Book Review, Patsy Baudoin(Jan 23, 1998)
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.
afegit per Lemeritus | editaLondon Observer, Robert McCrum
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.
afegit per Lemeritus | editaEntertainment Weekly, Megan Harlan
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.
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For Clifton Fadiman and Annalee Jacoby Fadiman, who built my ancestral castles
Primeres paraules
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Preface: When the Irish novelist John McGahern was a child, his sisters unlaced and removed one of his shoes while he was reading.
A few months ago, my husband and I decided to mix our books together.
Citacions
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Wake is just the right verb, because there is a certain kind of child who awakens from a book as from an abyssal sleep, swimming heavily up through layers of consciousness toward a reality that seems less real than the dream-state that has been left behind.
I, on the other hand, believe that books, maps, scissors, and Scotch tape dispensers are all unreliable vagrants, likely to take off for parts unknown unless strictly confined to quarters.
It has long been my belief that everyone's library contains an Odd Shelf. On this shelf rests 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.
In The Common Reader, Virginia Woolf (who borrowed her title from a phrase in Samuel Johnson’s Life of Gray) wrote of “all those rooms, too humble to be called libraries, yet full of books, where the pursuit of reading is carried on by private people.” The common reader, she said, “differs from the critic and the scholar. He is worse educated, and nature has not gifted him so generously. He reads for his own pleasure rather than to impart knowledge or correct the opinions of others. Above all, he is guided by an instinct to create for himself, out of whatever odds and ends he can come by, some kind of whole.”
Promising to love each other for richer or for poorer, in sickness and in health—even promising to forsake all others—had been no problem, but it was a good thing the Book of Common Prayer didn’t say anything about marrying our libraries and throwing out the duplicates. That would have been a far more solemn vow, one that would probably have caused the wedding to grind to a mortifying halt.
Once, looking up from a passage on the ideal wife, I asked George, “Do you consider me a peerless flower of beauty and spotless purity which has been laid upon your bosom?” George responded with a neutral, peace-preserving, but not quite affirmative grunt.
How melancholy, by contrast, are the legions of inscribed copies one finds in any used-book rack, each a memorial to a betrayed friendship. Do the traitors believe that their faithlessness will remain secret? If so, they are sadly deluded. Hundreds of people will witness it, including, on occasion, the inscriber. Shaw once came across one of his books in a secondhand shop, inscribed To———with esteem, George Bernard Shaw. He bought the book and returned it to ———, adding the line, With renewed esteem, George Bernard Shaw.
Why should people instantly know if a woman, but not a man, was married? Why should they care? The need for Ms. was indisputable. The hitch was feeling comfortable saying it. It sounded too much like a lawn mower. Gradually, my ear retuned. Now, although it’s probably a moot point—everyone except telephone solicitors calls me Anne—I am, by process of elimination, Ms. Fadiman. I can’t be Miss Fadiman because I’m married. I can’t be Mrs. Fadiman because my husband is Mr. Colt. I can’t be Mrs. Colt because my name is still Fadiman. I am, to my surprise, the very woman for whom Ms. was invented.
My reactionary self, however, prevails when I hear someone attempt to purge the bias from “to each his own” by substituting “to each their own.” The disagreement between pronoun and antecedent is more than I can bear. To understand how I feel about grammar, you need to remember that I come from the sort of family in which, at the age of ten, I was told I must always say hoi polloi, never “the hoi polloi,” because hoi meant “the,” and two “the’s” were redundant—indeed something only hoi polloi would say. (Why any ten-year-old would say hoi polloi in the first place is another, more pathological matter, but we won’t go into that here.)
I realize this is damning evidence—that once, when I ordered a chocolate cake to commemorate the closely proximate birthdays of my three co-Fadimans, I grabbed the order form from the bakery clerk, who had noted that it was to say “HAPPY BIRTHDAY’S,” and corrected it. I knew my family would not be distracted by the silver dragées or the pink sugar rose; had I not narrowly averted the punctuational catastrophe, they would all have cried, in chorus, “There’s a superfluous apostrophe!”
The offenses included fifty-six disagreements between subject and verb, eight dangling participles, three improper subjunctives, three double negatives, twelve uses of “it‘s” for “its,” three uses of “its” for “it’s,” three uses of “there” for “their,” three uses of “they’re” for “their,” and one use of “their” for “they’re.” Hunters shot dear; lovers exchanged martial vows; mental patients escaped from straight jackets; pianos tinkered; and Charles celebrated his twenty-fifth anniversary as the Prince of Whales. “There’s a huge demographic out there,” commented the News-Press film critic, “who appreciate good film and shouldn’t be taken for granite.” Even before I bumped into the large boulder at the end of that sentence, I had the feeling that I was reading a language other than English. I vowed I would never again take an intact declarative sentence for granite.
Our father, who often boasted that he had never actually done anything except think, was still the same person he had been when he started collecting books in the early 1920s. He and his library had never diverged. Our mother, on the other hand, had once led a life of action. And why had she stopped? Because she had had children. Her books, which seemed the property of a woman I had never met, defined the size of the sacrifice my brother and I had exacted.
The four hundred volumes that passed to me (which included the Trollopes but, unfortunately, not Fanny Hill) were at first segregated on their own wall, the bibliothecal equivalent of a separate in-law apartment. “You just don’t want your father’s Hemingways to be sullied by my Stephen Kings,” said George accusingly. “That’s not true.” He tried another tack. “Your father wouldn’t want his books to be a shrine. Didn’t you say he used to let you build castles with them?” This hit home. I realized that by keeping his library intact, I had hoped I might be able to keep my father, who was then eighty-six, intact as well. It was a strategy unlikely to succeed.
I lost the little volume. Or rather, it lost itself. Too slender to bear a title on its vermilion spine, On Books and the Housing of Them was invisibly squashed between two obese shelf-neighbors, much as a flimsy blouse on a wire hanger can disappear for months in an overstuffed closet. Then, last summer, when I pried out one of the adjacent books—the shelf was so crowded that a crowbar would have aided the operation—out tumbled the vanished ectomorph.
books get their value from the way they coexist with the other books a person owns, and that when they lose their context, they lose their meaning.
Darreres paraules
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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.
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