Great little volume of essays and meandering thoughts about bibliophilia, from obsession with punctuation to merging libraries with a lover to the odd shelf everyone has in their library. Lovely little snippets that you can read in five minutes to make you smile. ( )

I adored this book and everything about Fadiman's family. It is 157 pages made up of essays about her love of books and how they interact with her life and relationships. I found myself staring at my shelves, wondering if I should reorganize.

One of my favorite essays in the collection was Marrying Libraries, about Fadiman and her husband combining their books after 5 years of marriage and the difficulties when it comes to multiple copies and organization. M and I are both big readers but have only lived together for a year and a half and haven't combined libraries - plus we're not married, so if we ever break up, I don't want to have to go through it. On top of that he reads predominantly history and the occasional zombie book, where I am a fiction reader, so we don't have any doubles.

If you love books, you should most definitely read this, I am currently looking for the books in the 'Recommended Reading' section of this one. ( )

A collection of essays about reading & bibliophila that I started off laughing at, with delighted recognition, & ended up wishing she would shut up about her smug family. Far too much of the loathsome authoress competatively boasting about her & her family's achievements in that disagreeable American fashion. ( )

Although there are exceptions to this, in general I am not much of a fan of meta-nerd "books about books written for obsessive lovers of books," nor of essays that treat physical books themselves as precious sacred objects, to be lusted after like sex symbols and used to partially define who we are in the first place. (For what it's worth, I instead tend to look at books 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.) And that presents a problem with Anne Fadiman's 1998 essay collection Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader, recently acquired by my neighborhood library which is why it came to my attention: because although this book is destined to be intensely loved by some, they will tend to be the same people who make me roll my eyes rather severely when meeting, the kind of people for example who will spend days agonizing over the perfect answers to the kind of silly throwaway questions found on an online dating profile. ("'Hume is sexy; Voltaire is sexier.' No, but wait, what does that say about my long-term nagging doubts over the moral relativism inherent in Enlightenment philosophy?") And the reason this is a problem is that I hate giving so-so reviews of books simply because of a personal bias; and make no mistake, for what this aims to be, it's done quite well indeed, and will be highly satisfying for those of you who are already guessing that they might find it highly satisfying. (Ever correct the grammar of an NPR host? Ever chide a complete stranger for setting a book down open-faced? Ever deliver a monologue on French deconstructionist theory simply from an innocuous statement like, "I heard they're making a new movie out of Tintin?" Then this book is for you...and please stay the f-ck away from me.) So instead I'm doing today what I often do in these situations, to declare myself not a very appropriate person to give an opinion on this title, and to keep my review of it to a minimum in order to cause as little damage to its sales as possible. It's a book you bibliophiles will want to check out, even as it can be safely skipped by those who aren't.

Out of 10: 8.0 ( )

An interesting little book, while I think I read a lot (at least out of all the folks hat I know), I am no where near the snobbish level of the author. This really takes a love for reading to a whole different level, I don't particularly care for how my library or someone else's library is organized, as long as I can find my books. Nor do I care what other folks are reading, as long as I like it, its all that I care about. ( )