Title: Ex Libris
Author: Anne Fadiman
Pages: 157
Copy: borrowed from Sonoma County Library
Read: September 4-5, 2012
Spoilers: Again with the essays!
Yesterday, wishing to avoid investing my entire paycheck in
books as I occasionally do when the feeling hits, I wandered around my public
library and collected a huge stack of books (huge not in quantity but in size). I’ll admit the diversity of topics
represented in this pile makes me giddy: two Joan Didions (two hardcovers, one
1122 and the other 223 pages), a book simply titled Dissent in America (hardcover, 792 pages including index, but it
looks as large as a dictionary), Reading
Lolita in Tehran (a medium-sized paperback, 343 pages), a book on
anarchism between the mid-1800s and the early 1900s (a heavy hardcover of 482
pages), and, of course, Anne Fadiman’s Ex
Libris (a charming shrimp of a paperback that barely covers 157 pages). Perhaps the pile isn’t so large—I may have
only been overwhelmed by the weight and the slipperiness of the dust jackets.
At any rate, I came home and consumed in two short sittings Ex Libris. (Perhaps its slimness made it the most
appealing.) While Fadiman is no Didion
(Fadiman’s essays are somehow softer, lacking the crisp phrasing of a truly accomplished
essayist), she is a funny writer who obviously loves her books. That makes her a saint to me.
Ex Libris contains
short essays, each on some aspect of her reading life, whether it is her
obsessive habit of proofreading everything or her guilty pleasure (catalogs). As in any essay collection, some are better
than others.
Fadiman opens with the fantastic essay “Marrying Libraries,”
a meditation on what it means to combine libraries with the person you love and
to whom you are married. Along the way
the essay explores the many ways people organize their books (perhaps by color,
or maybe by author, or even by continent, as well as all the ways to organize
within a category—once you divide your books by continent, how do you organize
them? Fadiman’s response may be overly
complicated [British in chronological order, American by author], but a quite
reasonable response if you’re obsessed with organizing your library). (I reorganize my library at least four times
a year, always in different ways. As my
best friend pointed out, books need new neighbors with which to converse. I’ve always liked the idea of creating
strange juxtapositions, just so I can ponder what sort of arguments books will
get into as neighbors. My two,
double-packed shelves of mass-market paperbacks are giving me the most fun
right now. Somehow I doubt Carl Sagan’s Contact often ends up sandwiched between
This Side of Paradise and Penguin Modern Poets 9: Denise Levertov,
Kenneth Rexroth, William Carlos Williams, but I image its quite happy there. And I couldn’t guess what sort of
circumstances would lead to Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars ending up between Dialogues
of Plato and Anna Karenin, but
Plato needs to loosen up a little and read some science fiction. How Red
Mars is getting along with Tolstoy, though, is beyond my ken. See how much fun this is?)
I also enjoyed her essay “My Odd Shelf,” a discussion of her
literary obsession (failed polar expeditions—successful ones aren’t romantic
enough). Fadiman defines an odd shelf as
“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” (21).
I hardly know which shelf is my Odd Shelf (I’m tempted to say my whole
library is an Odd Shelf, but that seems doubtful). Perhaps my environmental shelf is the obvious
choice, though I’m tempted to say it’s my Penguin shelf, since I have a Penguin
shelf right now, but I’m not sure devotion to a publishing house really
counts. (By the way, you know you’ve
entered a whole new level of book-love when you can rank your favorite
publishing houses. Currently, my ranking runs thus: Penguin [within that category: their old mass market paperbacks, their
beautifully designed hardcover Penguin Classics, their fantastic yearly Great
Ideas collection, and finally their black paperback Penguin classics—they’re
new stuff doesn’t count], Oxford Classics, Modern Library, and, finally,
Vintage.) At any rate, Fadiman will make
you look at your library and try to work out which parts make the library and
which parts make the Odd Shelf, a fun activity for a lazy day.
My only complaint with the collection is Fadiman’s
occasional conceit and snobbery. The
essay that explores her obsession with proofreading demonstrates the drawbacks
of being too honest—while admitting to her snobby garners some sympathy, she
lost all my support on the last page of the essay, where she outlines all the
places she could have saved various people or groups money with her affliction
(as she calls it). While the first step
is always admitting to your quirky snobberies, the second step is letting
everyone else live their lives without your judgment. (Orwell’s essay “Politics and the English
Language” contains some salient advice: Excellent writing “has nothing to do
with correct grammar and syntax, which are of no importance so long as one
makes one’s meaning clear.” Unnecessary
apostrophes may be annoying, Ms. Fadiman, but they rarely make meaning unclear.) The other essay of Fadiman’s that I disliked
is “Eternal Ink,” a rather strange piece about her favorite pen and its
replacement, her computer. One thing
that has always annoyed me about writers speaking about how they write is the
strange emphasis they place on outdated writing techniques, as if writing with
a quill automatically makes you a better author. (Wendell Berry, who uses a pencil, is the
only author I’ve come across that actually has a solid, unromantic reason for
using older technology, which he explains in his essay “Why I Am Not Going
to Buy a Computer.”)
To conclude, I’d recommend this collection of essays to any
booklover of any age (the youngest readers will, at any rate, like to chew on
the edges, which I think would make Fadiman quite pleased). This book would make an excellent present if
you have no idea what else to get a person who loves to read (especially if you
don’t see eye-to-eye with them about their preferred reading material). To those who are a bit daring, this might be
a good book to present to people who don’t read. I can’t think of a better introduction to book-love
than this collection of essays, which, I hope, can convert even the staunchest
anti-reader.
--Benvolia
PS I’m sorry, Ms. Fadiman, if you read this and locate egregious
grammatical mistakes. I belong to the
Orwellian school of grammar.
