Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.62 (781 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 0374527229 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 162 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2017-10-10 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
For Fadiman, as for many passionate readers, the books she loves have become chapters in her own life story. 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. 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. 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. Perfectly balanced between humor and erudition, Ex Libris establishes Fadiman as one of our finest contemporary essayists.. This witty collection of essays recounts a lifelong love affair with books and language. 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 L
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. 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. --Alix Wilber. 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 reveal
flawless essays on a subject dear to you, gentle reader audrey frances This is an enchanting book of essays compiled from articles originally published in Civilization, the magazine of the Library of Congress. The subjects alone are enough to bring a smile to any "common reader", a phrase used by Virginia Woolf (and borrowed from Samuel Johnson) to connote an educated layperson who reads for pleasure rather than scholars. Marcy L. Thompson said Speaks to the book fanatic. What a marvelous book!When Anne Fadiman started to describe the merger of her library with her husband's (never mind that they had been married for years and had children together, this was the event that convinced her they were *really* married), I knew I had stumbled on a kindred soul. Anne Fadiman can write, and she chooses to write about what it m. The Joy of Book Fondling Beautifully Expressed Anne Fadiman is clearly one of us! If you, too, are among those who proofread and correct everything from restaurant menus to outdoor advertising, you'll love Fadiman's essay "Inset a Carrot" (with corrections, of course). A few years ago while visiting Monterey, California, I found myself finishing John Steinbeck's Canary Row. Later, when I read Fadi