About correcting sentence structures, there are far more odd things mentioned about her father that amuses any reader. The family is so obsessed about the language that the first thing that they do when they pick up a menu card at a dinner in any restaurant is to correct the grammatical errors in it. In another of her essays she gives a funny account of their entire family being obsessed with words, new words, old words, words used in different contexts.When the author mentions about her family talking about etymology of words as their dinner conversation, a reader can imagine the kind of family environment the she grew up. Only when she finally manages to mix her books with her husband’s, categorize them and arrange the two book shelves together, does she consider the true consummation of her marriage! Both shelves sported independent identities. In one of the essays she says that despite being married for 5 years, her books and her husband’s books were always in separate shelves. In one sense she is not a common reader by any standard!.Įach of the 18 essays speak about one specific aspect, each exploring a quirky aspect of either the author or her family members.

So, it comes as no surprise that she was surrounded by books right from childhood. Anne Fadiman hails from a literary family, her parents being authors and popular literary personalities. It is often used to indicate ownership of a book, as in “ from the books of …' or “ from the library of …”. The title of the book, Ex Libris is a Latin phrase, meaning, “ from the books”. Above all, she is guided by an instinct to create for himself, out of whatever odds and ends she can come by, some kind of whole.Īnne Fadiman is a faculty at Yale and her love of books has probably made her write 18 essays on books, over a period of 4 years. She reads for her own pleasures rather than to impart knowledge or correct the opinion of others. She is worse educated, and nature has not gifted her so generously. The common reader differs from the critic and the scholar. The author Anne Fadiman considers herself a common reader.

Ex libris fadiman