Ex Libris: Anne Fadiman

Image Credit: Westchestermagazine

Ah such a lazy day! It’s a holiday here in India today. Am at home, savoring small joys like reading for a couple of hours at a stretch while sipping coffee, after a long time. I have been lamenting about my tardiness in reading for some time now so what better book to perk me up than a book about reading itself! Here is a summary of Ex Libris – Confessions of a Common Reader by Anne Fadiman, another birthday present from a wonderful friend –

Ex Libris recounts a lifelong love affair with books and language. For Fadiman, as for many passionate readers, the books she loves have become chapters in her own life story. 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…Perfectly balanced between humor and erudition, Ex Libris establishes Fadiman as one of our finest contemporary essayists.

I have read Fadiman’s “At Large and At Small” and I found it fascinating, humorous and interesting enough to include her first essay collection Ex Libris to my to-read list. Continuing in Fadiman’s idiosyncratically witty vein, Ex Libris is a collection of essays that details Fadiman’s journey with language and reading since childhood. But it’s not that simple. She interlinks each essay and its topic to a personal story involving her husband or parents or children that leech out the dryness associated with essays.

The book begins with the essay ‘Marrying Libraries,’ about how Fadiman and her husband decided to merge their bookshelves and the process that went behind this exercise. What’s there to think about this, you might ask. Fadiman replies:

“We were both writers, and we both invested in our books the kind of emotion most people reserve for their old love letters.”

I, for one, totally understand the agony of merging my collection with another person’s. I don't think it would be easy for me to do so.

In the 2nd essay, ‘The Joy of Sesquipedalians,’ Fadiman recounts the joys of knowing sesquipedalians or long words. I love those too, except that I cannot remember a lot of them like her. More importantly, she posits an interesting thought here. Older books had a lot of words that readers might find difficult today. But they wouldn’t have been successful if most of the readers didn’t understand them.

“My guess is that in 1920, educated general readers would have…known Greek and Latin…”

This would have helped readers in understanding many of these words through etymological clues.

In yet another essay, ‘r/ Inset a Carrot e/’ which is one of my favorites in the collection, Fadiman describes her family’s as well as her own obsession with proofreading. Everything from restaurant menus (her mother expresses shock at seeing ‘peaking’ duck in a menu) to newspapers are not spared the Fadiman family’s critical eye. I am guilty of this many times myself. I have noticed bad spellings, often hilarious, in a lot of restaurants, hoardings and other places.

Many a time, I have expressed my annoyance and sadness to empathetic friends at the degeneration of the English language at the hands of the younger generation today. Technology has been nothing but an impediment in that sense helping vocabularies get thinner and words get shorter. Hence, books like Ex Libris delight me no end. It’s about reading for readers. But not just any reader. It’s filled with quirks that only people who are married to books and reading for a lifetime can understand and enjoy. The only point I would want to highlight is that there were a lot of words that I had to constantly look up in the dictionary. It was a great learning exercise but sometimes it slows the momentum of reading. Otherwise, it’s a thoroughly enjoyable read filled with observations that tickled me no end. I am a lifelong romantic in love with books and words and all the magic it has to offer. Am glad there are writers like Fadiman who recognize that magic and bring it to life.

Verdict: An educational and absorbing read
 
Rating: 4/5