Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader

When I was in college (and embarrassingly long after that), friends and I made a game of finding "unnecessary quotes" in our environs. In our own short hand, this meant searching for those signs with superfluous quotation marks that many (many, many--it turns out) people use to "punch up" their messages. What started us off, was the hand-lettered sign on a vending machine in the dorm basement that read:

Any further abuse of this machine will result in its removal.

"Think of those" who use it correctly.

Educated, priviliged snots that we were, this game threatened to become our life's calling.

Reading Anne Fadiman's series of short essays collected in Ex Libris is both a vaguely embarrassing mirror of my own life and also a window into "there but for the grace of---um, a different calling--go I." I absolutely loved this book, a really accessible, readable book about loving books and words and language.

Fadiman grew up in a hyper-literary family--her parents owned over 7,000 books--in which word games and trivia games were manna. Okay, who hasn't shouted out the answers in front of Jeopardy? But did your family give itself a team name and pound imaginary buzzers embedded in the stuffed chairs?(The Joy of Sesquipedalians). Her upbringing resembles a mash-up of my mother and aunt's recollection of their childhood (Greek as a lunchtime brain snack, for example) and mine in which a quick wit and a ready answer were prized.

To her credit and our gain, Fadiman is fully aware of both how irritating and amusing her life must seem to outsiders so she adopts a wry tone. There is nothing judgemental about her quirky intellect and her passion for books. She gives a glimpse into her past that shows how she became the writer and reader she is, and the present (1998) in which she describes having to sort and arrange books in the home she shares with her husband, an equally obsessed book-hoarder. Fadiman believes in categorizing books--specifically by time period. Her husband feels that disorder is part of the fun. "If he wants something, he believes it will present itself, and therefore it usually does," Fadiman writes (Marrying Libraries).

When I read that Fadiman has an entire section of her library devoted to Arctic Travel (The Odd Shelf), I realized the kinship was stronger than I'd thought. I was a devotee of books about what husband Ben once called "stupid people in cold places." My shelves creak under stacks of Arctic, Antarctic and Mountaineering books. I've moved on since and I suppose Fadiman may have as well.

Ex Libris was published in 1998 and I am curious what has happened since then to Anne Fadiman. Is she increasingly eccentric or has she mellowed over time? Does she now have her kids eagerly searching restaurant menus for errors, or do her kids prefer math puzzles? I like to think they watch quiz shows with her, their hands hovering over armchair buzzers, while her husband peruses their mile long bookshelf, searching for that one book that was just there...