"Ex Libris": Anne Fadiman and reading books

[fajrdrako]

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 do some of the things Fadiman mentions doing, like turning down pages. [(Here I manage to be simultaneously abusive and compulsive, she says: I turn down the upper corner for page-marking and the lower corner to identify passages I want to xerox for my commonplace book.)] I do write in margins, sometimes - but my friends have given me a terrific sense of guilt about it, so it seems a shameful activity to be done in secret. I never highlight words, never - that makes it difficult or impossible to read again. But notes in the margin are fun, and remind me of what I was thinking at that point in time, or what I found important. I particularly like putting a five-pointed star in the outside margin beside the most delicious quotes.

Let me confess my real crime. The worst and most monstrous act I have done to books - and I haven't done it in years, though I've been tempted - is to cut them into sections. I do this with long books, the particularly thick paperbacks. If I want to carry it around with me but I don't want the full weight, I take increments of, say, two hundred pages, and take the books apart, using lots of scotch tape to hold it together so pages don't fall off the end. I usually wrap a false cover around it. Then I can put it in my pocket or purse and take it with me easily.

I haven't done it for ages, perhaps because of my friend's horror and shock. They even tell each other about it. I've heard them do so. "Do you know what Elizabeth does to books?" They say it with a combination of amusement and horror, as if proud of my outrageousness, as if I was some kind of vampire with a record number of victims. Even though they've never seen me do it, it's just that (in compulsive honesty) I told them about it. Or maybe they saw one of the taped-together paper-wrapped multi-volume novels on my shelves that was never published that way. The very best books, I'd probably want to replace after I'd done that. But then... with the very best books I probably want a reading copy and a collecting copy anyway.

Okay, I was shamed out of doing that. The result? I get less chance to read, especially the long books I'd like to be carrying around with me at bus stops and while waiting in line. Maybe I should start doing it again.

Maybe I should photocopy that essay, and give it to my friends who don't understand that a person can love a book with a passion and still take it apart physically, while writing in the margins and sticking it with scotch tape.

Though I wouldn't ever write in a friend's book, a friend of mine once wrote in one of mine. We were in high school and I let her borrow my English poetry text. When I got it back, "The Hollow Men" was written all over with her classroom notes. In pen. I shook my head sadly at her faux pas. At the time, I didn't see it as a good thing, more like a breach of etiquette. It wasn't that writing on top of T.S. Eliot was disrespectful, (though he was then as now one of the stars in my pantheon), it was that I was afraid her notes would get between me and the words, because they were her notes, not mine. I was afraid it would interfere with my perception of the poem.

It never did. Now, looking back at that textbook more than thirty years later, her notes give that book and that poem all the more value to me. I've been out of touch with her since we graduated from university, but when I read her English notes scrawled over my pages, I remember her and smile. More than I would from any photograph. Kodak, eat your heart out.

Maybe, thirty years from now, Beulah will feel the same way about my smudge of chocolate.

Comments

[rosiespark.livejournal.com]

Now I feel like rereading the Fadiman book.

I'm afraid I fall into the courtly book lover category. Resoundingly so - I can remember quarelling with my best friend when we were both eleven, and she gave back my treasured Nancy Drew paperbacks in a less than pristine state. *g* But hey, I have nothing against you for cannibalising your own books. Particularly if it makes it easier for you to do more reading - that's a more than worthy cause.

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

I confess to disappointment when I let a friend borrow "Race of Scorpions" and the cover came back torn. Yes, I try to be careful about other people's books - hence my chagrin over the chocolate. Still. I consider my own fair game, in the bathtub, while eating, for reading in rainstorms, etc.

Nor are all books created equal. I an about to cut a copy of Cryptonomicon into 200-page segments, but it's a second-hand dublicate copy that already has a torn cover.

I haven't returned the Fadiman book to the library because I want to read it again, too.