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Loading... Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Readerby Anne Fadiman
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. Picked up because someone recommended the first essay, Marrying Libraries, and it was adorable and amusing. 18 total essays on books and reading and words. Fadiman is much more intellectual than I, so some essays were more difficult to relate to than others, although all were well-written. I'm not a fan of big words for their own sake and have never considered writing sonnets, but I could relate to compulsive proof-reading and a love of mail order catalogs. Her enthusiasm for books as objects, for the way they furnish a home as well as a mind, is appreciated. It's a nice warm fuzzy mug of cocoa of a book. ( )What an amazing little book! I picked this up in the airport on the way to Chicago and finished the next day on another flight to LA... I cannot pass up a bookstore, it is physically impossible for me; and I certainly cannot pass up a book about books!I had intended to read the essays in this volume one at a time, one per day over the course of my next trip as I am with several other collections but this little thing could not be put down.Ms. Fadiman's obvious love and lust for the written word and its physical manifestation, the book, is deep and absorbing. I will read and re-read this often... 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. no reviews | add a review
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Over the course of 18 charming essays Fadiman ranges from the "odd shelf" ("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") to plagiarism ("the more I've read about plagiarism, the more I've come to think that literature is one big recycling bin") to the pleasures of reading aloud ("When you read silently, only the writer performs. When you read aloud, the performance is collaborative"). Fadiman delivers these essays with the expectation that her readers will love and appreciate good books and the power of language as much as she does. Indeed, reading Ex Libris is likely to bring up warm memories of old favorites and a powerful urge to revisit one's own "odd shelf" pronto. --Alix Wilber
(retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:57:55 -0400)
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