Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader ~Anne Fadiman

–1998, Farrar, Straus and Giroux
–162 pages
–4.5/5 stars

“I have never been able to resist a book about books.”
~Anne Fadiman

Nor, of late, can I. It is unlikely, but not impossible, that this book would have ended up in my hands if it were not for the man dominating my reading of late, Nick Hornby. He mentions the book favorably in The Polysyllabic Spree. Like Hornby, Fadiman has an obvious love of the printed word which suffuses her essays with a warm glow. Reading Hornby and Fadiman back-to-back was an interesting experience. While the two have many similarities (in fact some of the subject matter in Housekeeping and Ex Libris actually mirrored each other), they also have some distinct differences. Nick Hornby is an obviously intelligent man who manages to write in an intelligent yet conversational style that embraces readers of all levels. Anne Fadiman is intelligent as well, but her writing seems to sit at a slightly different level. Not better, nor worse, just different. One is likely to find more words and references that need to be looked up in Ex Libris than in one of the three collections of Hornby essays. At first glance, Anne Fadiman’s essays seem to come off as more high-brow. But that image quickly fades as her essays ,manage to be every bit as accessible, because they cover a range of book related subjects echo the discussions had on book blogs the world over.

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Housekeeping vs. The Dirt ~Nick Hornby

–2006, Believer Books
–153 pages
–4.25/5 stars

It was with equal parts joy and sadness that I set out to read the second in Nick Hornby’s trilogy of books collecting his columns from Believer magazine. The sadness came from the fact that this was the remaining book of the three that I had not read and once it was over there would be no more. Had I harbored any intentions of savoring this and making it last (and believe me, I didn’t), those intentions would have been swept out the door as with a flood upon reading Hornby’s preface. In it he takes to task the idea of ‘proper’ vs. ‘improper’ reading. This book would have been worth reading just for this section alone.

“One of the problems, it seems to me, is that we have got it into our heads that books should be hard work, and that unless they’re hard work, they’re not doing us any good. I recently had conversations with two friends, both of whom were reading a very long political biography that had appeared in many of 2005’s ‘Books of the Year’ lists. They were struggling. Both of these people are parents–they each, coincidentally, have three children–and both have demanding full-time jobs. And each night, in the few minutes they allowed themselves to read before sleep, they plowed gamely through a few paragraphs about the (very) early years of a major twentieth-century world figure. At the rate of progress they were describing, it would take them many, many months before they finished the book, possibly even decades…The truth is, of course, that neither one of them will ever finish it–or at least, not in this phase of their lives. In the process, though, they will have reinforced a learned association of books with struggle.”

Hornby goes on to say:

“If reading is to survive as a leisure activity…then we have to promote the joys of reading rather than the (dubious) benefits…please, if you’re reading a book that’s killing you, put it down and read something else… All I know is that you can get very little from a book that is making you weep with the effort of reading it. You won’t remember it, and you’ll learn nothing from it, and you’ll be less likely to choose a book over Big Brother next time you have a choice.”

Many of us have made similar arguments about books and reading before, but I must admit that I get an extra shot of pleasure whenever a published author expounds upon the joys of reading and puts a fork in the overdone idea that there is a ‘right’ and a ‘wrong’ kind of reading.

Fear not, the serious tone of the preface doesn’t pervade the book, Hornby’s trademark humor is there in spades.

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