Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader

By her own admission, Anne Fadiman is the kind of person whose husband buys her nineteen pounds of dusty books for her birthday, who discovered that she learned about sex from her father's copy of Fanny Hill, and who once found herself poring over her roommate's 1974 Toyota Corolla manual because it was the only written document in the apartment that she had not read twice.

This clever anthology of articles describes a lifetime passion for language and literature. Like many ardent readers, Fadiman views the literature she loves as integral parts of her own narrative. She skillfully resurrects the tradition of the well-written personal essay, effortlessly switching between stories about her own pathologically literate family and stories about Coleridge and Orwell. Having grown up playing at blocks with her father's twenty-two-volume set of Trollope ("My Ancestral Castles"), and only truly feeling married after her and her husband's collections had combined ("Marrying Libraries"), she is incredibly well-suited to discuss the craft of inscriptions, the sinister joys of obsessive proof-reading, the attraction of long words, and the delights of reading aloud. A few writers have even gone so far as to indulge in sheer literary gluttony: Fadiman knows of many readers who practically devour page corners, while Charles Lamb enjoyed buttered muffin crumbs between the pages. With Ex Libris, Fadiman establishes himself as one of our best modern essayists, striking the ideal mix between scholarship and wit.