Ex Libris
1998
- books and reading
- bibliofilie
- reading interests
- essays (single author)
The story
In these eighteen essays, Anne Fadiman "recounts a lifelong love affair with books and language."--Jacket. Ex Libris 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 twenty-two-volume set of Trollope ("My Ancestral Castles") and who considered herself truly married only when she and her husband had merged collections ("Marrying Libraries"), she is exquisitely well equipped to expand upon the art of flyleaf inscriptions, the perverse pleasures of compulsive proofreading, the allure of long words, and the satisfactions of reading aloud.
What it’s like
Warm, bookish and unhurried, this collection of eighteen personal essays reads like a long evening conversation with a witty friend who keeps pulling old volumes off the shelf. The voice is conversational but precise, full of small domestic textures: a father's Trollope set stacked into makeshift blocks, a shared apartment where two libraries are slowly merged, the faded ink of flyleaf inscriptions, the pencilled marginalia of a family of compulsive readers. Each essay moves easily between anecdote and literary tangent, drifting from Coleridge and Orwell back to a household where reading was a kind of weather. The pacing is gentle and digressive, so it suits a rainy Sunday, a slow cup of tea, or a few pages before sleep. Emotionally it is affectionate and wry, with a quiet undertow of nostalgia and self-deprecating humour rather than drama; the arc is the writer's own growing into a life shaped by words. There is no violence, no sexual content and nothing frightening; the most intense moment is a sharp observation about a bad sentence. Written for lovers of books about books, for readers who enjoy the personal essay, and for anyone who has ever argued over shelf order.
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