Anne Fadiman may like to think of herself as a common reader, but I have my doubts. Does a common reader record the fifteen spelling errors in a printing of Nabokov's "Speak, Memory" - and then send the list to the author? Call it obsessive or fastidious (in hindsight, Fadiman calls it "meddlesome"), but it's hardly common.
Nonetheless, it makes for a good story - one of the many that make up Fadiman's newly published "Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader," a collection of essays from her Civilization magazine column of the same name. Chronicling the lifelong bibliomania of her family (she knows of what she writes - her father, Clifton, was a founder of the Book-of-the-Month Club), Fadiman tells of how her earliest building block was a twenty-two volume set of Trollope, her first lesson on sex came from her father's well-worn copy of "Fanny Hill" and how it took her and her husband five years past their own nuptials to marry their respective libraries. ("The hardest task," she writes, was "when we sorted through our duplicates and decided whose to keep. I realized that we had both been hoarding redundant copies of our favorite books 'just in case' we ever split up.")
Fadiman's proof-reader's eye is an inherent trait; her family (and who can blame them?) thrills at discovering a mistake in an advertisement or menu. "'They've transposed the e and the i in Madeira sauce,' commented my brother."
"'They've made Bel Paese into one word,' I said, 'and it's lowercase.'" "'At least they spell better than they place we had dinner last Tuesday,' said my mother. 'THEY serve P-E-A-K-I-N-G duck.'"
Fadiman's writing style is as clever, witty and personal as the anecdotes she tells, and her sincere love of books and language turns a potentially prissy subject into a real charmer. In other hands, an essay called "The Joy of Sesquipedalians" and detailing her family's car-trip game of identifying literary quotations would not only be unbelievable, it would be as dry as a bone.
And just in case you're wondering, "sesquipedalian" means - yup - "long word."
(Shelly Ridenour)
- "Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader"
copyright 1998 New City Communications, Inc.