Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader

by Anne Fadiman

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 1974 Toyota Corolla manual because it was the only thing in her apartment that she had not read at least twice. EX LIBRIS wittily recounts a lifelong obsession with books. Writing with humour and erudition she moves easily from anecdotes about Coleridge and Orwell to tales of her own pathologically literary family. 'One of the most delightful volumes to have come across my desk in a long while...witty, enchanting and supremely well-written' -- Robert McCrum, Observer

• ISBN10: 0374527229
• ISBN13: 9780374527228
• Publish Date: 25 November 2000 (first published 31 October 1998)
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: AU
• Imprint: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Format: Paperback
• Pages: 162
• Language: English

Reviews

[Michael @ Knowledge Lost]

Anne Fadiman has often stated that she learned about sex from her father’s copy of Fanny Hill (correct title for this book is Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure) by John Cleland. Ex Libris (which is Latin for ‘from books’) is a collection of essays that recounts her life and her love affair with books. This collection of personal essays documents her life and those small problems only a fellow book lover would truly understand. Like when Anne and her husband finally decided to merge libraries five years into their marriage in the essay “Marrying Libraries”.

I have to admit, I love Anne Fadiman; she is the embodiment of everything I want to be as a reader. She is smart, witty, a little wry and can talk about books with great passion and intelligence. She does come across as pretentious and throws in some quotes in French just to show off, however her writing is so beautiful and she talks about books, not just as a personal experience but also includes some literary criticism.

This collection recounts a lifelong love affair she had with books; exploring the joys and passion that comes with being a book lover. I love how she talks about books in the form of personal essays; it gives me a whole new concept about writing. I obviously knew about personal essays in the past but something about this book just opened my eyes and made me think “I should be doing this”. The way she talks about her reading journey in a collection of connecting essays is wonderful; it turns the book not into a linear progression but rather focuses each essay on an experience or book.

You might have noticed that when I review books I tend to put a bit of my personal life and journey into the blog post. The style suits me and because I want to think of my book blog as a personal journal into my reading life, I feel it fits that theme. Anne Fadiman has a similar idea but in the form of essays and she puts my writing to shame; I now aspire to write as elegantly as she does with wit and beauty within each essay. I am nowhere near where I want to be but practise makes perfect; right?

This is the kind of collection I plan to read over and over again. I obviously love books and Anne Fadiman has obviously set the bar high for future books. I started reading memoirs from bibliophiles because I wanted to learn different ways to talk about books. Ex Libris has taught me so much more about books and just reminds me how much I love books about books. I have a whole heap of other memoirs to read and to be honest reading about people’s reading life has given me an appreciation for memoirs in general. I want to read more styles; not just readers but writers and then progress to other types of creativity. I remember starting the year struggling through non-fiction but it looks like I am ending this year with a completely new attitude towards them.

[MurderByDeath]

I loved this from first word to last.  A collection of essays first published in Civilization, each about some facet of the love of books or the written word.

Her first essay, Marrying Libraries started the collection off on a high note with me; after 10 years together, I still can't quite embrace the marriage of my books with MT's: he has his shelves and I, mine.  I've only recently (last weekend) catalogued his books in my database software; until that point neither of us knew what he had or didn't.

Other highpoints of the collection for me included Never Do That To a Book, My Ancestral Castles and Secondhand Prose.  Fadiman's essay on plagiarism was...interesting.  I'm fairly sure it's heavily satirical, (it's 10 pages long and has 38 footnotes, some rather absurd) but reading it, it is clear that she has strong feelings about the theft of other people's work.  I was left with the feeling that she felt conflicted about such a sticky subject.  She has also written an outstanding essay on compulsive proofreading, whose title includes those handwritten edits that are impossible to reproduce on a screen with nothing but a keyboard.  But it's one of my top three favourites of the book.

Ex Libris wraps up with a small chapter of recommended reading; a list of books about books; a list I'll be using in the next few days as I look for more titles to add to my TBR.

[Kait ✨]

I loved EX LIBRIS. It’s a book about books, but what I like about this one is that Fadiman talks about so many different aspects of reading. EX LIBRIS is comprised of eighteen essays, each on a different aspect of reading; for example, there are essays on “marrying libraries,” or the process of integrating one’s library with one’s significant other; categorizing and organizing libraries; the joy of words; writing in books; etc. Fadiman’s writing reveals her as a lifelong, passionate lover of books; she describes growing up surrounded by books, and in doing so, she writes, “My brother and I were able to fantasize far more extravagantly about our parents’ tastes and desires, their aspirations and their vices, by scanning their bookcases than by snooping in their closets. Their selves were on their shelves.” To me, this sentiment encapsulates so much of what I love about EX LIBRIS. It’s a book about loving books, but it’s also about how books shape people, and the power they have once they have infiltrated our lives.

One of my favourite essays in this collection is “The Odd Shelf,” because it introduced an idea to me I’d never considered before. “It has long been my belief that everyone’s library contains an Odd Shelf,” she writes. “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. George Orwell’s Odd Shelf held a collection of bound sets of ladies’ magazines from the 1860s, which he liked to read in his bathtub. Philip Larkin had an especially capacious Odd Shelf crammed with pornography, with an emphasis on spanking. Vice Admiral James Stockdale, having heard that Frederick the Great had never embarked on a campaign without his copy of The Encheiridion, brought to Vietnam the complete works of Epictetus, whose Stoic philosophy was to sustain him through eight years as a prisoner of war. My own Odd Shelf holds sixty-four books about polar exploration: expedition narratives, journals, collections of photographs, works of natural history, and naval manuals.” Isn’t it fascinating to think about 1) your own Odd Shelf contains, and 2) what everyone else’s does? I had never thought about my own book collection in this way, and I’m not quite sure yet how I’d characterize my Odd Shelf, but it seems like a really fun way to get to know someone, or to think about other people’s libraries critically as an extension of their person.