Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader

Was inspired by

Canonical title

Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader

Original title

Ex libris: Confessions of a Common Reader

Original publication date

1998

Dedication

For Clifton Fadiman
and Annalee Jacoby Fadiman,
who built my ancestral castles

First words

Preface:
When the Irish novelist John McGahern was a child, his sisters unlaced and removed one of his shoes while he was reading.

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A few months ago, my husband and I decided to mix our books together.

Quotations

Wake is just the right verb, because there is a certain kind of child who awakens from a book as from an abyssal sleep, swimming heavily up through layers of consciousness toward a reality that seems less real than the dream-... (show all)state that has been left behind.

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I, on the other hand, believe that books, maps, scissors, and Scotch tape dispensers are all unreliable vagrants, likely to take off for parts unknown unless strictly confined to quarters.

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It has long been my belief that everyone's library contains an Odd Shelf. 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 clos... (show all)er inspection, reveals a good deal about its owner.

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Americans admire success. Englishmen admire heroic failure.

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In The Common Reader, Virginia Woolf (who borrowed her title from a phrase in Samuel Johnson’s Life of Gray) wrote of “all those rooms, too humble to be called libraries, yet full of books, where the pursuit of reading is... (show all) carried on by private people.” The common reader, she said, “differs from the critic and the scholar. He is worse educated, and nature has not gifted him so generously. He reads for his own pleasure rather than to impart knowledge or correct the opinions of others. Above all, he is guided by an instinct to create for himself, out of whatever odds and ends he can come by, some kind of whole.”

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Promising to love each other for richer or for poorer, in sickness and in health—even promising to forsake all others—had been no problem, but it was a good thing the Book of Common Prayer didn’t say anything about marr... (show all)ying our libraries and throwing out the duplicates. That would have been a far more solemn vow, one that would probably have caused the wedding to grind to a mortifying halt.

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Once, looking up from a passage on the ideal wife, I asked George, “Do you consider me a peerless flower of beauty and spotless purity which has been laid upon your bosom?” George responded with a neutral, peace-preservin... (show all)g, but not quite affirmative grunt.

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How melancholy, by contrast, are the legions of inscribed copies one finds in any used-book rack, each a memorial to a betrayed friendship. Do the traitors believe that their faithlessness will remain secret? If so, they are ... (show all)sadly deluded. Hundreds of people will witness it, including, on occasion, the inscriber. Shaw once came across one of his books in a secondhand shop, inscribed To———with esteem, George Bernard Shaw. He bought the book and returned it to ———, adding the line, With renewed esteem, George Bernard Shaw.

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Why should people instantly know if a woman, but not a man, was married? Why should they care? The need for Ms. was indisputable. The hitch was feeling comfortable saying it. It sounded too much like a lawn mower. Gradually, ... (show all)my ear retuned. Now, although it’s probably a moot point—everyone except telephone solicitors calls me Anne—I am, by process of elimination, Ms. Fadiman. I can’t be Miss Fadiman because I’m married. I can’t be Mrs. Fadiman because my husband is Mr. Colt. I can’t be Mrs. Colt because my name is still Fadiman. I am, to my surprise, the very woman for whom Ms. was invented.

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My reactionary self, however, prevails when I hear someone attempt to purge the bias from “to each his own” by substituting “to each their own.” The disagreement between pronoun and antecedent is more than I can bear.... (show all) To understand how I feel about grammar, you need to remember that I come from the sort of family in which, at the age of ten, I was told I must always say hoi polloi, never “the hoi polloi,” because hoi meant “the,” and two “the’s” were redundant—indeed something only hoi polloi would say. (Why any ten-year-old would say hoi polloi in the first place is another, more pathological matter, but we won’t go into that here.)

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I realize this is damning evidence—that once, when I ordered a chocolate cake to commemorate the closely proximate birthdays of my three co-Fadimans, I grabbed the order form from the bakery clerk, who had noted that it was... (show all) to say “HAPPY BIRTHDAY’S,” and corrected it. I knew my family would not be distracted by the silver dragées or the pink sugar rose; had I not narrowly averted the punctuational catastrophe, they would all have cried, in chorus, “There’s a superfluous apostrophe!”

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The offenses included fifty-six disagreements between subject and verb, eight dangling participles, three improper subjunctives, three double negatives, twelve uses of “it‘s” for “its,” three uses of “its” for �... (show all)��it’s,” three uses of “there” for “their,” three uses of “they’re” for “their,” and one use of “their” for “they’re.” Hunters shot dear; lovers exchanged martial vows; mental patients escaped from straight jackets; pianos tinkered; and Charles celebrated his twenty-fifth anniversary as the Prince of Whales. “There’s a huge demographic out there,” commented the News-Press film critic, “who appreciate good film and shouldn’t be taken for granite.” Even before I bumped into the large boulder at the end of that sentence, I had the feeling that I was reading a language other than English. I vowed I would never again take an intact declarative sentence for granite.

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Our father, who often boasted that he had never actually done anything except think, was still the same person he had been when he started collecting books in the early 1920s. He and his library had never diverged. Our mother... (show all), on the other hand, had once led a life of action. And why had she stopped? Because she had had children. Her books, which seemed the property of a woman I had never met, defined the size of the sacrifice my brother and I had exacted.

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The four hundred volumes that passed to me (which included the Trollopes but, unfortunately, not Fanny Hill) were at first segregated on their own wall, the bibliothecal equivalent of a separate in-law apartment. “You just ... (show all)don’t want your father’s Hemingways to be sullied by my Stephen Kings,” said George accusingly. “That’s not true.” He tried another tack. “Your father wouldn’t want his books to be a shrine. Didn’t you say he used to let you build castles with them?” This hit home. I realized that by keeping his library intact, I had hoped I might be able to keep my father, who was then eighty-six, intact as well. It was a strategy unlikely to succeed.

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I lost the little volume. Or rather, it lost itself. Too slender to bear a title on its vermilion spine, On Books and the Housing of Them was invisibly squashed between two obese shelf-neighbors, much as a flimsy blouse on a ... (show all)wire hanger can disappear for months in an overstuffed closet. Then, last summer, when I pried out one of the adjacent books—the shelf was so crowded that a crowbar would have aided the operation—out tumbled the vanished ectomorph.

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books get their value from the way they coexist with the other books a person owns, and that when they lose their context, they lose their meaning.

Last words

(Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)"I bought it," he said, "and took it home."

Publisher's editor

Galassi, Jonathan; Wimmer, Natasha

Blurbers

Lehmann-Haupt, Christopher; Minzesheimer, Bob; Baudoin, Patsy; Harlan, Megan; McCrum, Robert; Merriman, Ann Lloyd (show all 11); Steiner, Andy; Zane, J. Peder; Gopnik, Adam; Ozick, Cynthia; Hoagland, Edward

Original language

English

Canonical DDC/MDS

814.54

Canonical LCC

PN4874

Disambiguation notice

The essays in this book appeared in a slightly different form, in Civilization magazine.