"Ex Libris": Anne Fadiman and reading books

Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader by Anne Fadiman.

Several people recommended this on one of my more interesting mailing lists, so, always drawn to recommended books and stories, I got it from the library.

There is a certain class of books this falls into: authors like Annie Dillard (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek), A New Kind of Country by Dorothy Gilman, and a few others.... Books where the focus consists of the thoughts and ideas of the writer and their attitude to life. Bill Bryson's books come close to this, but he never loses his focus on the topic of the book - the history of science, the English language, the Appalacian trail - however reflective and witty he is being, the books are about those things, not about himself. And yet the kinds of books I'm thinking of are not memoirs or autobiographies, but glimpses of the author's mind.

Anne Fadiman's book is about reading. It's also about books but it's about the act of reading and how we feel about it. Why and how we read. It's about a reader's relationship with books.

As I read, I kept wishing I had someone to read the choice bits aloud to. (You on my friend's list are appointed, for the time being.) The sense of *recognition* in so much of what the author said was amazing. I particularly liked the essay "Never Do That To a Book", about how different people treat books differently. I seem to be surrounded by people who treat books as if they were immaculate and inviolable things, while I think of them as... well, not quite like that. Anne Fadiman put it so much better. She starts with an anecdote about a hotel chambermaid who was horrified that her brother left a book open, face-down, on his bedside table. (Note: I do that all the time.) She continues:

During the next thirty years I came to realize that just as there is more than one way to love a person, so is there more than one way to love a book. The chambermaid believed in courtly love. A book's physical self was sacrosanct to her, its form inseparable from its content; her duty as a lover was Platonic adoration, a noble but doomed attempt to conserve forever the state of perfect chastity in which it had left the bookseller. The Fadiman family believed in carnal love. To us, a book's *words* were holy, but the paper, cloth, cardboard, glue, thread, and ink that contained them were a mere vessel, and it was no sacrilege to treat them as wantonly as desire and pragmatism dictated. Hard use was a sign not of disrespect but of intimacy.

This gives a voice to my side of the fence. I've never come across that before. Most of my friends - at least, where the subject has come up in discussion, which I suppose makes sense when you think about it - are Courtly Love book lovers. I recently borrowed a book from my friend Beulah; when I returned it to her, she noticed the spot of chocolate I got on page 76, and I was embarrassed. Don't get me wrong, I adore Beulah, I respect her respect for books and her desire to keep them pristine - maybe my embarrassment is because despite that respect, I still got a spot of chocolate on the book where I never meant to. My own books are fair game. I prefer to respect the wishes of my friends, especially when they've done me the favour of lending me the book in the first place. On the other hand - it spoils my pleasure in reading just a little, if I have to be so very careful of the pages, of the book as a pure object.

( Now, I don't... )