Ex Libris

Anne Fadiman gathers eighteen personal essays about a lifetime spent with books and language. For her, as for many devoted readers, the books she has loved have become chapters of her own life, and she writes from inside that experience.

The essays move between anecdotes about writers such as Coleridge and Orwell and stories from her own family, which she presents as pathologically literary. As a child she built with her father's twenty-two-volume set of Trollope, a memory that anchors the essay My Ancestral Castles. In Marrying Libraries, she counts herself truly married only from the day she and her husband merged their book collections.

The subjects are specific and often playful. She writes about inscriptions on flyleaves, the odd pleasure of proofreading compulsively, the appeal of long words, and the satisfaction of reading aloud.

This is non-fiction in the form of the well-crafted personal essay, a collection rather than a single argument. Each piece can be read on its own, and the tone is warm, witty and conversational. It suits readers who recognise themselves in the habits of people who live with too many books.