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Summary: Hilarious reinforcement for the Readaholic!
Review: This book is sheer enjoyment for anyone who loves to read. I laughed 'til my eyes teared at her chapter on the compulsive proofreader (Insert a Car^/rot)! Anne Fadiman obviously had fun examining the many facets of the reader/book relationship - and the human relationships also affected. Both the trials, and special pleasures unique to married readers are all here. The books brought to bed, attendant crumbs, read-aloud passages... And the reading parent and child relationship, with chewed pages, re-visited favorites, the teen discovery of erotica on a parent's shelf. It's all here, in her fresh and clean prose.I, who NEVER read non-fiction without a concrete need, could not put this book down! It is a book to read, keep, and share. Throughout her essays, you will recognize yourself, your family members, and your friends who read, with their beauties and eccentricities (often one and the same). If I had the money, I'd buy a cratefull! I have already thought of at least a dozen folks to whom I would love to give this book...
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Summary: Digest the subject matter, but don't swallow!
Review: I thoroughly enjoyed this book.Fadiman teaches you how to be a beautiful bibliophile .If you are an obsessive reader, you might as well make this preoccupation an art. Categorize your books. Stroke them occasionally and even eat them if necessary. She tells you that there is as much magic in a book's form as there is in its essence. After reading this book i have promised myself never again to by a new book if i can buy it in a used book store. Used books have character that comes with age,coffee stains, and the result of great minds pondering over its intricacies. I also share her fascination with words.Her comments on plagiarism are quitw thought provoking.Isn't there an element of the romantic in doing something for its own sake?To steal words not because you have to but just because?I liked her idea of the "odd shelf" For instance i have this collection of books on the similarities between vedic ritual and fishing!One of the best books on books!
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Summary: lovely book, with extraordinary essay on plagiarism
Review: This book has the best essay I have read on plagiarism. This may sound strange, but due to the nature of my work, in which I have been involved for some years with matters of academic integrity in universities, I have been somewhat of a student of plagiarism. I like it better than Mallon's book (Stolen Words) by a good measure, and in my view, he stands above the rest of the literature on plagiarism. I sought out this book because I was so taken with Fadiman's previous book, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down. I had put off buying it for a long time because, in general, I don't like to seek out tragedies, and it seemed to qualify. It was pressed upon me by a friend, however, to my benefit--reading it changed the way I look at some aspects of the world. After that, I was ready to read whatever else Fadiman had written. I agree with other reviewers that this is a charming book, although it does have its precious moments. But the plagiarism essay more than compensates for any shortcomings, and several of the others, including those mentioned in other reviews, are also gems. I hope Fadiman writes lots more, on many topics. (I must say that I read Bill Bryson's Australia book right after The Spirit Catches You, and my reaction to his anguishing about redressing wrongs to the Aborigines and not knowing what can be done was that it is clear what to do: Australia should invite Anne Fadiman to come and study and then advise them.)
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Summary: A delightful read
Review: This is the perfect little book for anyone who prefers reading to TV watching. Fadiman grew up in a reading family where their favorite pastime was grilling each other about the origins of quotations. "Like the young Van Dorens, the Fadiman children were ritually asked to identify literary quotations. While my mother negotiated a honking traffic jam on an L.A. freeway... my father would mutter, 'We are here as on a darkling plain...' and Kim and I would squeal in chorus, 'Dover Beach.'" While some might find this egocentric, I was enthralled with their literary banter. My family used to hold similar competitions on words and quotes, and of course we played Jeopardy! against each other for years. There are many excellent essays in this collection - I particularly loved one of her funniest essays on plagiarism in which she swamps the readers with a multitude of superfluous footnotes. Another hilarious essays details her encounter with the legendary William Shawn (New Yorker) who tried not to embarrass her for not knowing the correct pronunciation of the "Ms." in Ms. Magazine. This is a book to be savored while sipping tea, reclined in a favorite reading chair in the family library.
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Summary: Proving you can love books for more than just their words
Review: I keep this slim book of essays on my bedside table - it is something to read when I have nothing else. Or something it is just to read instead of anything else. Anne Fadiman has described the love of books and of words in all their forms in a series of short essays. Her chapters cover a range of subjects, from the discovery of rare words, merging libraries, book buying and to the odd shelf - a whole range of subjects for confirmed bibliophiles. My favourite chapter, the one I read over and over again is "The Joy of Sesquipedelians" - when she found a book from the 1920's full of words she had never read before. It is like a short detective story tracking showing both the changing background which underlies our education and experiences, and reflects the changes in our language. Words in common use then are barely used or understood now. How many of us know the meaning of Grimoire, Paludal, retromingent, apozemical, goetic and some 17 others. These beautiful words that roll off the tongue - it seems criminal that they are now almost extinct . The final chapter is the loveliest - a surprise birthday trip which ends up being to a second hand bookshop. This book is a joy to read for those that find it a joy to read.
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Summary: A Charming Defense of Bibliophilia
Review: It begins...(not really, drop to the next paragraph and skip seven words in)..."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-state that has been left behind. I was such a child." This is who we are. Those of us stricken with this Blessed Illness will find ourselves reflected lovingly within the pages of this elegant and thoughtful work. Through a series of charming, moving, and at times hilarious essays, Anne Fadiman chronicles a life lived in literature. The first essay, "Marrying Libraries" chronicles the attempt by the author and her husband "to mix our books together." We bear witness to their loving drama as she says, his "English garden" approach to organization collides with her "French garden" sensibilities. A series of precarious negotiations commences. Should our books be seperated by nationality? Yes. Should they be ordered chronologically or alphabetically? Well...yes and yes. Yes, the British literature canon should be ordered chronologically since it spans over six centuries. But, the American literary canon should be ordered alphabetically due to the fact that nearly all of it is twentieth century literature. All of which leads to the following question: Should one be chronological WITHIN each author? CRISIS!!! A particularly bad moment occured while he was in the process of transferring my Shakespeare collection from one book case to another and I called out, "Be sure to keep the plays in chronological order!" "You mean we're going to be chronological within each author?" he gasped. "But no one knows for sure when Shakespeare wrote his plays!" "Well," I blustered, "we know he wrote Romeo and Juliet before The Tempest. I'd like that reflected on our shelves." George says that was one of the few times he had seriously contemplated divorce. The crux of the essay and I believe the book comes when they are left to the fifty or so books that they both own, the duplicates. The question becomes: which ones do we keep? We each owned about fifty books in common. We decided that hardbacks would prevail over paperbacks unless the paperbacks contained marginalia. We kept my Middlemarch, read at eighteen, in which were registered my nascent attempts at literary criticism (page 37: "Grr"; page 261: "...."; page 294: "Yccch"); George's Magic Mountain; my War and Peace. Women in Love generated the most agonizing discussion. George had read it at sixteen. He insisted that whenever he reread it, no edition other than his original Bantam paperback, with it's psychedelic cover of one nude and seminude woman, would possibly do. I had read it at eighteen. I kept no diary that year, but I had no need of one to remind me that that was the year I lost my virginity. It was all too apparent from the comments I wrote in my Viking edition (page 18: "Violence substitute for sex"; page 154: "Sexual pain"; page 159: "Sexual power"; page 158: "sex"). What could we do but throw in the towel and keep both copies? Their bridges had been burned. In the essay, "You-Are-There" Fadiman, illuminates the role a certain setting can have upon a reader's experience, namely reading the novel in the place in which it is set. She opens the essay, appropiately with a scene: On November 12, 1838, Thomas Babington Macaulay set out by horse-drawn coach from Florence to Rome. "My journey lay over the field of Thrasymenus," he wrote in his journal, "and as soon as the sun rose, I read Livy's description of the scene." The being a titanic battle between the Romans and Hannibal, in which the Romans suffered a devastating defeat, fifteen thousand of their number dying in three hours. This is an example of "You-Are-There" reading. The essay evolves from Thomas Babington Macaulay, whom she considers possibly the greatest reader to ever live, to her own experiences with "You-Are-There" reading. She goes on to list her own adventures: "I had read Yeats in Sligo, Isak Dinesen in Kenya, and John Muir in the Sierras. By far my finest You-Are-There hour, however, was spent reading the journals of John Wesley Powell, the one-armed Civil War veteran who led the first expedition down the Colorado River, while I camped at Granite Rapids in the bottom of the Grand Canyon." What follows being a loving potrait of a young married couple on vacation in the Grand Canyon reading, The Exploration of the Colorado River and it's Canyons. As she says, "In one crucial aspect, I bested Macaulay. Alone on his grand tour, he had no one to share the rapture of Thrasymenus except the shade of Livy. In the Grand Canyon, I had George." Her own account and the descriptions have even inspired me to take one of my favorite books and plan to reread it in it's various settings, that book being, A Soldier of the Great War by Mark Helprin, the settings being Rome, Munich, and Venice, hopefully next year. Each essay can be viewed as a love letter to and about the reading life, as well as a series of lover letters from a wife to a husband. It is a charming and endearing account of one woman's love of literature from an early age to young womanhood to marriage. But I dare say that it is more than just ab out the author's encounters with literature. It is a testament to all of us who take life from books and infuse not just our own narratives with literature, but inject our selves into the novels that we love over the years. For I find myself on my shelves.
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Summary: A delightful little book!
Review: This is a wonderful little series of essays about "common readers," i.e., people who aren't literary critics, but people who love books, among whom I proudly count myself a member. At first I was afraid this might be a book for people who can afford original Austens and Dickens', and then leave them on their shelves to be untouched by human hands so the market value can rise. This book, however, is for people who aren't ashamed to say they'd still rather their beat-up high school copy of Hardy rather than the Franklin Mint edition. Some critics said that Fadiman was a little snooty describing her extremely literary household. Anne Fadiman, if you're reading this, I think it's wonderful that you grew up in such a household. Don't go changin'!
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Summary: Short, sweet and brilliant
Review: It was so much fun to feel accompanied in the somewhat foolish love of books and their presence in life. The way Ms. Fadiman let's us into her private life and History is very well accomplished. I especially loved the essay in which the love of reading was passed down to her by living in a household where reading was commonplace (books stacked on every horizontal space, including the toilet)
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Summary: Speaks to the book fanatic
Review: 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 means to live a life surrounded by (and wallowing in, let's admit it!) books. Her love affair with the written word permeates this book. The details of her life are completely different than mine, but this book made me feel like I understood her from the inside out. I read large parts of this book out loud, to anyone I could find who seemed like they might find it amusing. Most of them ran out and got themselves a copy of the book. I can't read it out loud to you, so all I can say is if you love reading, if you are consumed with a love of the written word, Anne Fadiman's book will speak to the deepest part of your soul.
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Summary: a classic grimoire
Review: for all bookworms, this is essential reading!!! a close friend recommended the book to me but i knew that i had to get my very own copy of the book since i knew that i was probably going to refer to it as much as i do a thesaurus. Fadiman totally cracks me up but the best aprt of it is that i felt like i was reading all about myself -- i understood and could relate to all that she was saying -- as though she were dictating the words in my mind -- and i think all the people out there who are addicted to books will feel the same about EX LIBRIS. And in case you aren't yet addicted to books, EX LIBRIS will transform you into one of us people who spend their money on nothing else but books!!
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