Reviews for Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader
Review - Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader
Always interesting and often funny.
Reviewed by Roger on 1999-12-09 07:49:32
Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Readerby Anne Fadiman | |
| List(s): | "Carp 500" |
|---|---|
| Category: |
"Literature/Essays" |
| Pages: | 162 |
| Year of Publication: | 1998 |
| Date Read: | 12/08/1999 |
| Notes: | Fadiman speaks joyfully of books, book collecting, and book ownership ("In my view, nineteen pounds of old books are at least nineteen times as delicious as one pound of fresh caviar"). In "Marrying Libraries" Fadiman describes the emotionally fraught task of merging her collection with her husband's: "After five years of marriage and a child, George and I finally resolved that we were ready for the more profound intimacy of library consolidation. It was unclear, however, how we were to find a meeting point between his English-garden approach and my French-garden one." COMMENTS — 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"). |
| My Rating: | 9 |