When I got married, I, like most brides, had a bridal shower (mostly because my mom threw it for me). However, I think it’s weird and a little self-indulgent (aren’t all weddings these days?) to invite everyone to throw you a party and bring you presents to celebrate another party you will have where they will have to bring you another present. So--here is where I reveal my great nerdiness at which my mom still continues to laugh when she tells the story--I told my friends instead to bring a book that meant something to them with a little note explaining why they wanted to give me this book. In this exchange, I learned more about each of my friends as well as what she thought about our friendship and me. One friend, who thought I needed to take a break from my “school” reading, bought me a mystery novel (much appreciated on the honeymoon); one of my non-English major but still literary friends gave me Snow Falling on Cedars (the best part was her thoughtful note explaining why she chose the book); Shelley bought me a beautiful edition of To Kill a Mockingbird, which I couldn’t stop myself from marking up while reading it (only evidence it is well-loved); and Melville (here is the point of this anecdote) gave me two collections of Anne Fadiman’s amazing essays.
[Needless to say, I've lost touch with the person who bought me Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus].
This morning, while grasping for a topic to write about--I didn’t think anyone wanted to read about my application adventure that seized my time for the last two months--I picked up my well-thumbed copy of Ex Libris, Anne Fadiman’s “Confessions of a Common Reader.” Whenever I read the collection, I intend to read and perfectly digest one essay at a time--each essay deserving of its own written reflection. However, drawn in by her easy storytelling and the feeling that we are kindred spirits, I inevitably read the whole collection in a sitting.
If you love books or love books about books, then you too will probably be captivated by her personal essays. A self-proclaimed bibliophile, she more than loves books--they are indeed part of her very being. And, in this culture that seems to be proud of its illiteracy and its impatience for reading, as Melville described in her previous post, or that seems to ignore its failing bookstores and libraries, Fadiman’s voice and passion instill hope that there will always be us crazy nerds, instinctively correcting other people’s bad grammar and preferring to buy books instead of food.
Every essay is about reading or books in some capacity, but each essay is also always about something else--because books are always more than books. When you read, the story becomes part of you, it has revealed something to you, it has uncovered that little bit more about the world, it has built another connection. Her essays demonstrate how a book or a poem or a story can become so much more than something written on the page. For instance, In “Scorn not the Sonnet” she begins by discussing why she tends to favor the sonnet, telling about her own failed attempt at poetry and also relating why she cherishes the form: “You could fit the whole world in there if you shoved hard enough.” At the end of the essay, however, she narrates her father’s descent into blindness. He--as another bibliophile and writer--could not see a life without reading. Blindness was his death. Then, she reminds her father that Milton wrote Paradise Lost blind. Together they read Milton’s sonnet “On His Blindness” (posted in my previous post), and his hope is restored just enough to help him continue: “Milton’s sonnet provided the first glimmer of the persistent intellectual curiosity that was to prove his saving grace.” The essay is not one of my favorites because she discusses Milton but because it shows how powerful words are--they can have an impact on our imagination and our selves if we just give ourselves the time and space to let them.
[My other favorites include an essay comparing reading to eating and another playful essay on plagiarism and the many great kleptomaniac writers (like Shakespeare).]
[The quote in the title of this blog is not Fadiman’s but Macaulay’s]
<3
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