Anne Fadiman is the sort of person who learned about sex from her father’s copy of Fanny Hill, and who once found herself poring over a hen Anne Fadiman was growing up, she writes in her endearing collection of essays, “Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader,” her family. Anne Fadiman, author of Ex Libris, talks about her latest ‘confessions’, words like ‘ whiffling’, and perfect literary dinner guests.
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There are essays on merging her library fadimna her husband’s, on the delight of finding long, delicious words, on sonnets, on “carnal-love” book lovers versus “courtly-love” book lovers for the record, I’m in the carnal-love category–my books know they are lovedink pens, flyleaf inscriptions, the compulsive ed This book was WAAY too much fun.
What else should one expect from distilled magazine pieces?
I would be scurrying around in the kitchen with Mary Lamb – she and I would do the cooking. Recommended to Madeleine by: The two make for a marked, yet intriguing contrast, since they are both talking about the same subject: Ours was a love at first sight that is usually only relegated to the fictions we both treasure as though they are the pillars upon which our own personal histories rest and, really, they decidedly do.
It’s a silly thing to be bothered about, I know, but warm familiarity is chilled ever so quickly by gate-keeping, no matter how subtle or unintentional. I have always preferred Keats to Wordsworth, but I was never able to put my finger on why until I read that Wordsworth, according to a visitor, “will live for a month on cold beef, and the next on cold bacon,” whereas Keats once wrote his friend Charles Wentworth Dilke: Some catalogs read as poetry.
She figures The Odyssey will take them six months. The Fadiman family on the other hand, are “carnal” lovers of books. Goodreads helps you keep track of books you want to read. Now if only she’ll return my calls. In charming tales about vocabulary and grammar and the obsessive need to fix errors of both”Odd Shelves” and the odd titles found on them in her case, a vast collection of books on polar exploration, and it’s a good thing she didn’t offer any titles because I would’ve had to add them allchallenges of combining one’s library with a loved one’s own, the many proper ways of handling a book including using them as building blocksas well as joys of reading aloud, reading about food, and reading books in the place they are about the nearest I ever managed was reading George R.
Ex Libris is an absolutely lovely book, which makes me feel privileged fadimman be a bookworm. You Are There of the excitement of reading a book in the place it was written! Some of these come and go, while others come and stay. For what it’s worth, I instead tend to look at fafiman as simple delivery vehicles for what’s truly important, the information being conveyed on their pages through the codified use of language, and tend not to revere such things as precious objects except in truly special circumstances, like first editions and small-run art books and the like.
I was having a bit of a rereading kick during September largely due to the fact that my TBR shelves were almost exhaustedand decided to pick up Anne Fadiman’s charming little volume of essays, Ex Libris: Are you a courtly book-lover or a carnal one?
It is their content not their matter that interests me! Jun 18, Fadima rated it liked it. This annee book is an absolute gem!!!
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.
For all those admirers of my ‘prolix’ prose, libria one’s for you. It is all about the words, not the physical structure that holds them, so it is ” When her brother left a book open and facedown on a hotel night table, he was chastised with a note from the chambermaid: This is a delightful slim book, a collection of personal essays about her love of reading.
Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader by Anne Fadiman
Now I feel we are too busy not to read him. In college I took a couple of classes that taught me I would never be a novelist. Book readers and writers, both alike, would agree that plagiarism is a sin and imitation to the extent that it’s a blatant copy is not the sincerest form of flattery. With an essay you are, decidedly, not rushing. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Look up ex libris in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. I found there was a tad too much of a focus on Fadiman’s personal life and other subjects not strictly book-related, which frankly didn’t do much for me.
I think that’s about enough. Her writing first appeared in Britain inwith the publication of Ex Librisa rare and enchanting celebration of bibliophilia; one woman’s salute to words like ‘sesquipedalian’, ‘apopanax’ and ‘goetic’, to the romance of flyleaf dedications, and to the joy of reading aloud.
Lust for words, and ice-cream too
I confess that when this story was told, everyone around the dinner table concurred that justice had been served.
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.
Two anme my most salient characteristics- reading and eating. Confessions of a Common Reader and I were destined for each other. Paperbackpages. This witty collection of essays recounts a lifelong love affair with books and language. This was my first book about books. Lists with This Book.