Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

The subtitle of Anne Fadiman's slim collection of essays is Confessions of a Common Reader, but if there is one thing Fadiman is not, it's common. In her previous work of non-fiction, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, she brought both skill and empathy to her balanced exploration of clashing cultures and medical tragedy. The subject matter here is lighter, but imbued with the same fine prose and big heart. Ex Libris is an extended love letter to language and to the wonders it performs. Fadiman is a woman who loves words; in "The Joy of Sesquipedalians" (very long words), she describes an entire family besotted with them:

When I was growing up, not only did my family walk around spouting sesquipedalians, but we viewed all forms of intellectual competition as a sacrament, a kind of holy water as it were, to be slathered on at every opportunity.

From very long words it's just a short jump to literature, and Fadiman speaks joyfully of books, book collecting and book ownership ("In my view, 19 pounds of old books are at least 19 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.

Perhaps some marriages could not have stood the strain of such an ordeal, but for this one, the merging of books becomes a metaphor for the solidity of their relationship. 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 favourites and a powerful urge to revisit one's own "odd shelf" pronto. --Alix Wilber -- Dieser Text bezieht sich auf eine andere Ausgabe: Taschenbuch .

The subtitle of Anne Fadiman's slim collection of essays is Confessions of a Common Reader, but if there is one thing Fadiman is not, it's common. In her previous work of nonfiction, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, she brought both skill and empathy to her balanced exploration of clashing cultures and medical tragedy. The subject matter here is lighter, but imbued with the same fine prose and big heart. Ex Libris is an extended love letter to language and to the wonders it performs. Fadiman is a woman who loves words; in "The Joy of Sesquipedalians" (very long words), she describes an entire family besotted with them: "When I was growing up, not only did my family walk around spouting sesquipedalians, but we viewed all forms of intellectual competition as a sacrament, a kind of holy water as it were, to be slathered on at every opportunity." From very long words it's just a short jump to literature, and 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." Perhaps some marriages could not have stood the strain of such an ordeal, but for this one, the merging of books becomes a metaphor for the solidity of their relationship.

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 -- Dieser Text bezieht sich auf eine vergriffene oder nicht verfügbare Ausgabe dieses Titels.

Fadiman, author of the award-winning The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down , has selected 18 book-related essays from her cache of "Common Reader" columns written for Civilization magazine to create a tribute to her love of the printed word. The first essay discloses the most intimate act of her marriage: the commingling of her and her husband's libraries. Having established just how seriously she takes books, Fadiman goes on to reveal the depths of her fascination with "odd" books and out-of-favor words, and the habit of "reading books in the places they describe." Her accounts often focus on family traits, including a compulsion to proofread everything from menus to the daily newspapers, and a craving for reading that must be satisfied in emergencies with anything at hand, such as the yellow pages or appliance instructions. As delectable and witty as these divulgences are, it is Fadiman's profound appreciation and knowledge of books and all that they convey that hit home. Donna Seaman -- Dieser Text bezieht sich auf eine vergriffene oder nicht verfügbare Ausgabe dieses Titels.

Award-winning journalist and editor Fadiman (The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, 1997) comes from a bookish family (her father is Clifton Fadiman). And part of the charm of these collected personal essays about books and book-loving is the way she adhesively, casually, playfully chronicles her family through its books and bibliomania. An essay about the devoted reader's compulsive love of proofreading opens novelistically with the Fadiman parents and their adult children sitting down to a restaurant dinner and, as their preferred first course, passionately - helplessly? - correcting the menu's typos. As a reporter who is here making a transition to the first-person essayist's voice, Fadiman (also the new editor of the American Scholar) maintains a sparkling sense of story, whether the stories tell us about her or about someone else. And her book shows an impish range in subject. In ``Never Do That to a Book,'' she comments on hard uses made of books: how we're wont to scribble in them, even teethe on them. ``My Odd Shelf'' discusses that part of a bibliomaniac's library dedicated to the anomalous fervent hobby (for George Orwell, it was ``ladies' magazines from the 1860s, which he liked to read in his bathtub.'' Fadiman's own odd shelf holds volumes about the history of polar explorations, and she retells some of these sagas in admirably vivid and unadorned style. At times, the origin of the essays as commissioned pieces for the author's column in Civilization magazine does restrict their scope: they seem too brief, glib, coy, or intellectually unventuresome. As a self-described romantic whose imagination lauds the Victorians and seems jovially (and delightfully) anachronistic, Fadiman comes across sometimes as an escapist unwilling to examine the terms of her escape or to question them. Instead, she's intelligently entertained by books - and she's entertaining. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. -- Dieser Text bezieht sich auf eine vergriffene oder nicht verfügbare Ausgabe dieses Titels.

In this delightful collection of essays, Fadiman, the award-winning author of The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down (LJ 9/1/97) and the new editor of The American Scholar, ponders on "how we maintain our connections with our old books, the ones we have lived with for years, the ones whose textures and colors and smells have become as familiar to us as our children's skin." Drawn from Fadiman's "Common Reader" column in Civilization magazine, these 18 pieces wittily explore her family's bibliomania. (Her father, Clifton Fadiman, was a founder of the Book of the Month Club.) From describing the trauma of marrying her personal library with her husband's ("my books and his books had become our books") to detailing the joy of browsing second-hand bookstores ("seven hours later, we emerged...carrying nineteen pounds of books"), Fadiman writes with an appealing warmth and humor. Highly recommended for bibliolaters and bibliophiles everywhere.?Wilda Williams, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. -- Dieser Text bezieht sich auf eine vergriffene oder nicht verfügbare Ausgabe dieses Titels.

A charming account of a lifelong obsession with books, which combines anecdotes about figures such as Orwell and Coleridge with tales of the author's own pathologically literary family. "One of the most delightful volumes to have come across my desk in a long while..." Robert McCrum, }The Observer{. -- Dieser Text bezieht sich auf eine andere Ausgabe: Taschenbuch .

Critical acclaim for EX LIBRIS
"A book for bookworms. . . 18 stylish, dryly humorous essays. . . [a] charmingly uncommon miscellany on literary love." --Entertainment Weekly

"Intimate, humorous, informative, and perceptive. . . delightful reading." --Jack Matthews, The Washington Times

"For Fadiman, books are the building blocks with which a life is made. . . With breezy, self-effacing humor and dollops of literary trivia, the essays in EX LIBRIS try to cajole us into restoring books to the heart of family life." --Lucia Perillo, Chicago Tribune

"In the literary Eden that forms Anne Fadiman's life, the air remains pure allusion, the marginalia flows, and the only snake in the grass is a typo. . . Lissome essays on bibliophilism and language." --Renee Tursi, The New York Times Book Review

"Anne Fadiman is no ordinary reader. . . [EX LIBRIS] is an unapologetic confession of raging bibliophilia. . . a modest, charming, lighthearted gambol among the stacks. It serves up neither ideas nor theories, but anecdotes about the joys of collecting and reading books. Like Calvin Trillin, Fadiman believes that family members, however lovable, are best considered as joke material." --Dan Cryer, Salon

"Pure joy from beginning to end." --Bob Hale, Duxbury Clipper -- Dieser Text bezieht sich auf eine vergriffene oder nicht verfügbare Ausgabe dieses Titels.