It occurs to me that for Fadiman, the rating system for used books employed by on-line purveyors is entirely backwards. She writes of people who eat books, literally digesting the words, and her own son’s consumption of the corners of Good Night Moon. She writes of her childhood in which she used her father’s books as building blocks and how her own children do the same with hers. Her essay, “Never Do That to a Book” issues a solid approval of all of my mishandling of her work. My copy of Fadiman’s book is slightly ruined in my own library – a little warped from moisture, a little dog-eared, and not without considerable underlining and marginalia. Her vocabulary is vast and slants Victorian, which, to my mind, is an asset. The book is full of factual tidbits so seamlessly incorporated into its text that I come away feeling as though I could hold my own at an English Department dinner party.

Her own writing is scholarly without being snobbish, a situation ripe for incidental learning. Her taste for reading was nurtured by her academic parents in a household stuffed to bursting with books. Fadiman is the kind of person you see walking on the street devouring a book open in front of her. In it are eighteen delightful essays about reading, about books, about personal libraries and about words by someone who is, I would say, an entirely un-common reader. Anyway, the trivialities of my self-initiated treatment plan aside, what better book to re-read than Anne Fadiman’s Ex Libris Confessions of a Common Reader. It’s easier, what with my memory the way it is now. As part of my ongoing concussion recovery, I’m teaching myself to read again, an activity that I always found so joyful before and now find so daunting.

Confessions of a common reader