Anne Fadiman’s Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader is a delight, a delicious collection of stories from a life of loving books, collecting books, sharing books, and most important of all (of course!) reading books.  Fadiman comes from a family of readers and writers and married a reader and writer. I can imagine scenarios where such circumstances could lead to in-bred gloating over book gluttony but Fadiman remains as freshly entranced by books as the most newly-arrived apprentice to the coven of library card holders.  And coven it is: all of us who delve into books regularly know that reading is a magic, that books are capable of casting the most powerful of spells, and that the wizardry is not about building vocabulary or boosting brain cells or assuring future success, but about the adventure offered here and now in the reading and forever in the remembering, of a great book.

Fadiman is a very funny and clever writer, and very generous with ideas, both her own and others, about how books complement life.  Her thrills with books are about both the connections offered (especially when she finds others’ notes in her used books, proof of the links between readers and writers over generations) and even more about the escape offered in reading about real or imagined experiences.  She also loves words and grammar and her affections are infectious: when she writes, “I regret that  have spent my life until now without knowing that a grimoire is a book of magic spells, or that an adytum is the inner sanctum of a temple“, I joined in her regrets and thanked her for teaching me that mephitic means stinky (but can I call my favorite cheese mephitic?).

Fadiman is full of funny anecdotes, both about herself and her family and about other writers.  She tells of how Thomas Hardy handled the issue of having fans send him books for his signature: as he explained to his visiting pal Yeats, showing him to a large room filled  floor to ceiling with books, “these are the books that were sent to me for signature“  and how George Bernard Shaw, having inscribed a book to friend “with esteem“,  found that same book in a secondhand bookshop; he bought the book and returned it to the same friend, with the further inscription, “With renewed esteem.”

Fadiman has a very funny piece on the joy of reading mail order catalogs and she dates herself and me and the book Ex Libris by quoting and praising the catalog beloved by so many (and memorialized so well in Seinfeld) the J. Peterman catalog.  It was the preferred bathroom reading of the romantic and well-read, with its allusions to Proust, Tangiers, Hemingway, Paris, plums, thirties’ convertibles and twenties’  flappers, danger in Africa and love in Spain, and anything sultry under the moon and stars.  As Fadiman puts it, “It is a Harlequin romance for the kind of people who vacation in Krk.”  Or wish they vacationed in Krk, I would add.

I was a fan of Ex Libris from the get-go, with her first essay on the trials of combining two book collections forced to cohabitation through marriage, and I followed her, panting and grateful, through the essays.  She has found what I have found which countless others have found: the deep satisfaction of excitement, romance, adventure, and meaning that books offer.  She quotes  Macaulay on books:  “What a blessing it is to love books as I love them….to be able to converse with the dead and to live admist the unreal!“  I understand him perfectly, and I understand Fadiman in all her book-loving essays.