Perfectly balanced between humor and erudition, Ex Libris establishes Fadiman as one of our finest contemporary essayists. 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 Anne Fadiman as one of our finest contemporary essayists. Ex Libris, by Anne Fadiman An ardent reader who still remembers the glorious moment when I first decoded the black marks in a Golden Book and found a story waiting for me, I love books. 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. 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 an acknowledged biblioholic, I was intrigued by the premise of. For Fadiman, as for many passionate readers, the books she loves have become chapters in her own life story. Anne Fadiman, Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1998). Anne Fadiman is the author of The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, winner of a National Book Critics Circle Award, an L.A. This witty collection of essays recounts a lifelong love affair with books and language. Buy Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader New Ed by Fadiman, Anne (ISBN: 8601406165533) from Amazons Book Store. 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.

Ex libris fadiman