Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader

by Anne Fadiman

there is a certain kind of child who awakens from a book as from an abyssal sleep, swimming heavily up through layers of consciousness toward a reality that seems less real than the dream-state that has been left behind.

in 1920, educated general readers would have considered my list difficult but not impossible. Many of them would have known Greek and Latin, which would have provided etymological clues to about half the list;

Americans admire success. Englishmen admire heroic failure. Given a choice—at least in my reading—I’m un-American enough to take quixotry over efficiency any day.

They also serve who only stand and wait.”

“What a blessing it is to love books as I love them,” he wrote to a friend, “to be able to converse with the dead, and to live amidst the unreal!”

My reactionary self, however, prevails when I hear someone attempt to purge the bias from “to each his own” by substituting “to each their own.” The disagreement between pronoun and antecedent is more than I can bear.

I said “to each his own” until about five years ago, believing what my sixth-grade grammar textbook, Easy English Exercises, had told me: that “or her” was “understood,” just as womankind was understood to be lurking somewhere within “mankind.” I no longer understand.

Not a problem in romance languages or for most of 8 billion humans.

You’d think that after all these decades, we Fadimans would have mapped every corner of our deviant tribal identity, but apparently there was one pan-familial gene we had never before diagnosed: we were all compulsive proofreaders.

What a bunch of captious, carping, pettifogging little busybodies! It is true—and I realize this is damning evidence—that once, when I ordered a chocolate cake to commemorate the closely proximate birthdays of my three co-Fadimans, I grabbed the order form from the bakery clerk, who had noted that it was to say “HAPPY BIRTHDAY’S,” and corrected it. I knew my family would not be distracted by the silver dragées or the pink sugar rose; had I not narrowly averted the punctuational catastrophe, they would all have cried, in chorus, “There’s a superfluous apostrophe!”

The writers—no longer slowed by having to change their typewriter ribbons, fill their fountain pens, or sharpen their quills—tend to be prolix.

In Anna Karenina, all the essential differences between Oblonsky and Levin are laid out in the Moscow restaurant scene during which the former orders three dozen oysters, vegetable soup, turbot with thick sauce, capon with tarragon, and fruit macédoine, while the latter longs for cabbage soup and porridge.

the kleptomaniacal plagiarist is compelled to steal. It’s clear, for example, that Senator Joe Biden (or his ghostwriters), who borrowed parts of his speeches from Neil Kinnock, Robert Kennedy, and Hubert Humphrey, among others, couldn’t not plagiarize. Biden even plagiarized his apology for plagiarizing from The Grapes of Wrath.

Our father, who often boasted that he had never actually done anything except think, was still the same person he had been when he started collecting books in the early 1920s.

when I walk into an apartment with books on the shelves, books on the bedside tables, books on the floor, and books on the toilet tank, then I know what I would see if I opened the door that says PRIVATE—GROWNUPS KEEP OUT: a child sprawled on the bed, reading.

He did, however, inherit the family Bible. Sixty years ago, his father read a chapter from it every night, leading Campbell to believe that Saul and David spoke with West Texas accents.

Beatrix Potter and Charles Dickens seem to have attended the same Violent Writers School, and when I got to the part where the man with the gun blasts off the rabbit’s tail and whiskers (“BANG!”), I can tell you that Henry and I were both breathing pretty heavily.

Lamb believed that it was criminal to read Shakespeare and Milton silently, even if no one was there to listen.

Reading aloud means no skipping, no skimming, no cutting to the chase. At the rate we’re going, it will take us six months to get Odysseus home to Ithaca—which isn’t so bad if you consider that it took him ten years.

Marriage is a long-distance course, and reading aloud is a kind of romantic Gatorade formulated to invigorate the occasionally exhausted racers.

as a writer, he may be the only man in history to have written a long-winded twenty-nine-page book.

I believe that books—buying them, reading them, annotating them, indexing them, housing them, and writing about them—saved Gladstone from paralyzing stress.