Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader

by Anne Fadiman

Americans admire success. Englishmen admire heroic failure.

Hard use was a sign not of disrespect but of intimacy.

we gave each other our first Christmas presents. Of course, they were books.

“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!”

One day, when Sir Walter Scott was out hunting, a sentence he had been trying to compose all morning suddenly leapt into his head. Before it could fade, he shot a crow, plucked a feather, sharpened the tip, dipped it in crow’s blood, and captured the sentence.

Word-processed addresses are even worse. What a pleasure it is to open one’s mailbox and find a letter from an old friend whose handwriting on the envelope is as instantly recognizable as a face!

My brother and I were able to fantasize far more extravagantly about our parents’ tastes and desires, their aspirations and their vices, by scanning their bookcases than by snooping in their closets. Their selves were on their shelves.

When you read silently, only the writer performs. When you read aloud, the performance is collaborative. One partner provides the words, the other the rhythm.