Ex Libris, Confessions of a Common Reader, by Anne Fadiman.
Originally a series of columns in Civilization magazine, Ex Libris, Confessions of a Common Reader, is a collection of essays and anecdotes in which Anne Fadiman expresses not a love, not an obsession, but a life spent in the willing and complete immersion of books and the beauty of words. Here is a writer whose identity and life have been defined by books. From the compulsive, automatic proof-reading that any bibliophile finds themselves doing on a daily basis, to the beauty of the second-hand bookstore, from the admission that reading A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway invariably makes her want to eat sausages and potato salad, to the feeling of utter and pure contentment that finding a new word in the dictionary can bring, each chapter in Ex Libris discusses a different element of this life immersed in books.
She perfectly describes the parallels between reading and location. You can read anywhere; you can be in the worst place on Earth and reading will carry you away. In this sense, location is irrelevant, because the book is the location. But then there is reading ON location! She gives the examples of reading Wordsworth at Grasmere, Gibbon in Rome and even reading Homer’s Odyssey in Cyclops’s cave! Having barely been able to contain my excitement at reading Virginia Woolf whilst sitting in her garden in Sussex, next to the garden room where I had just viewed her original desk, chair and writing implements, Fadiman’s description of this sensory verisimilitude - like much of the book as a whole - felt like a photograph into my literary experiences and ideas.
She describes the process of merging her books with her husband’s books, something which they only felt ready to do after they had been married to one another for five years and had a child together. The love she feels for books is merged with and mirrored by the love she feels for her husband. This intimacy is very touching and at times profound. In a chapter half way through the book, where she discusses dedications and inscriptions in books, and what they can tell us about past owners of our books, she quotes her favourite inscription, written by her husband in his own book The Enigma of Suicide when he presented a copy to her: “To my beloved wife...This is your book, too. As my life, too, is also yours.”
Whilst her relationship with books is unbreakable though, it is not one of reverence or awe. It is the words that make up a book she loves, not the book as an object. To her, the content is sacred, not the vessel. She writes marginalia in books, leaves them spread-eagled on the floor, turns down the pages, uses them as doorstops and rug-flatteners. As someone who has been known to write shopping lists in the back of Tolstoy, bend small paperbacks in order to fit them in a handbag and of course corrugate many a novel from hours reading in the bath, I particularly rejoiced when reading this chapter. I have many a paperback on my shelves with post-it notes peeping out marking pages of interest. They may not be the pages I would be most interested in now, but I will not remove them because they mark my initial experience of reading the book. I leave my bookmarks in, and when I say bookmark I usually mean whatever was to hand at the time - a train ticket, the receipt for the book, a chocolate wrapper, a photograph. This engagement with books Fadiman describes as carnal love, which seems entirely appropriate and accurate to me. There are those who have more of a relationship of courtly love with their books; they put their books on pedestals inside glass cabinets and carefully turn the pages with immaculate fingers. This is still passion, just a different breed of passion and one which firmly separates book lovers from one another. I find it impossible to understand how someone with the courtly love approach can truly engage with a book; how do they remember where they first read the book, or what they were eating at the time?! What do they read in the bath or on the train? Equally though I have been accused of desecrating books by someone who found it impossible to see my carnal love approach as any kind of affection, let alone passion. I love the fact that one of my three year old daughters favourite books is tattered around the edges where she has chewed and cuddled it, that a page in the middle has a milk stain on it and another page some purple crayon because she felt a flower in the story should be purple. Fadiman is wonderfully unapologetic about these characteristics and feelings of a self-confessed bibliophile.
This submission to books; her surrender to words and their power on her is what makes this book truly wonderful. She describes what seems to me a higher spiritual state of wordy contentment to which any word-addict aspires. In communicating her passion for books and their transformative potential and ability, she creates a transformative book herself; one that has the power to excite and challenge us and make us think about what it means to be ourselves, as well as what it means to be with our books.
She perfectly describes the parallels between reading and location. You can read anywhere; you can be in the worst place on Earth and reading will carry you away. In this sense, location is irrelevant, because the book is the location. But then there is reading ON location! She gives the examples of reading Wordsworth at Grasmere, Gibbon in Rome and even reading Homer’s Odyssey in Cyclops’s cave! Having barely been able to contain my excitement at reading Virginia Woolf whilst sitting in her garden in Sussex, next to the garden room where I had just viewed her original desk, chair and writing implements, Fadiman’s description of this sensory verisimilitude - like much of the book as a whole - felt like a photograph into my literary experiences and ideas.
She describes the process of merging her books with her husband’s books, something which they only felt ready to do after they had been married to one another for five years and had a child together. The love she feels for books is merged with and mirrored by the love she feels for her husband. This intimacy is very touching and at times profound. In a chapter half way through the book, where she discusses dedications and inscriptions in books, and what they can tell us about past owners of our books, she quotes her favourite inscription, written by her husband in his own book The Enigma of Suicide when he presented a copy to her: “To my beloved wife...This is your book, too. As my life, too, is also yours.”
Whilst her relationship with books is unbreakable though, it is not one of reverence or awe. It is the words that make up a book she loves, not the book as an object. To her, the content is sacred, not the vessel. She writes marginalia in books, leaves them spread-eagled on the floor, turns down the pages, uses them as doorstops and rug-flatteners. As someone who has been known to write shopping lists in the back of Tolstoy, bend small paperbacks in order to fit them in a handbag and of course corrugate many a novel from hours reading in the bath, I particularly rejoiced when reading this chapter. I have many a paperback on my shelves with post-it notes peeping out marking pages of interest. They may not be the pages I would be most interested in now, but I will not remove them because they mark my initial experience of reading the book. I leave my bookmarks in, and when I say bookmark I usually mean whatever was to hand at the time - a train ticket, the receipt for the book, a chocolate wrapper, a photograph. This engagement with books Fadiman describes as carnal love, which seems entirely appropriate and accurate to me. There are those who have more of a relationship of courtly love with their books; they put their books on pedestals inside glass cabinets and carefully turn the pages with immaculate fingers. This is still passion, just a different breed of passion and one which firmly separates book lovers from one another. I find it impossible to understand how someone with the courtly love approach can truly engage with a book; how do they remember where they first read the book, or what they were eating at the time?! What do they read in the bath or on the train? Equally though I have been accused of desecrating books by someone who found it impossible to see my carnal love approach as any kind of affection, let alone passion. I love the fact that one of my three year old daughters favourite books is tattered around the edges where she has chewed and cuddled it, that a page in the middle has a milk stain on it and another page some purple crayon because she felt a flower in the story should be purple. Fadiman is wonderfully unapologetic about these characteristics and feelings of a self-confessed bibliophile.
This submission to books; her surrender to words and their power on her is what makes this book truly wonderful. She describes what seems to me a higher spiritual state of wordy contentment to which any word-addict aspires. In communicating her passion for books and their transformative potential and ability, she creates a transformative book herself; one that has the power to excite and challenge us and make us think about what it means to be ourselves, as well as what it means to be with our books.
posted by Annabel at 2:33 am
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