Now this is incredibly weird. This is one of my all-time favorite books. Hands down. It's a winner. And I have a policy to always snag a copy when I see one in a used bookstore. I have given away countless copies to worthy and potentially worthy individuals. I. Love. This. Book.

So this fall, we went up to Durham for a visit. And while there, we (of course) made a stop (it's mandatory) at one of our all-time favorite bookstores, The Regulatory on 9th Street. There I found this copy of Ex Libris, which was lovely. Now, here's the weird thing. This book, if i read the inscription correctly, was originally part of a collection a friend of mine inherited on the death of his monther. My friend lives in Charleston, his mom was in Myrtle Beach. After she passed, I received a huge batch of her books to BookCross, but not this one. Yet it found me. How weird is that????

There are so many things I love about this book. But I shall let you discover for yourself all the joys of Ex Libris. I cannot afford to send this book overseas, but would like to send it on a journey from loving reader to loving reader. If it never reaches me again, that's okay too. I just want people who love books to have the chance to read it, if you haven't already.

I'll send it to the first person who posts in my live journal they want it and are willing to send it on to whomever is next. Please pass it along, and share the love of loving books. Once someone has posted here, I'll post to the LJ BC group to open it up, and then you all can fight out the order and who it goes to, based on your abilities to send it along.

Travel well, little book....

From the Publisher

Anne Fadiman is--by her own admission--the sort of person who learned about sex from her father's copy of Fanny Hill, whose husband buys her 19 pounds of dusty books for her birthday, and who once found herself poring over her roommate's 1974 Toyota Corolla manual because it was the only written material in the apartment that she had not read at least twice.
This witty collection of essays recounts a lifelong love affair with books and language. For Fadiman, as for many passionate readers, the books she loves have become chapters in her own life story. Writing with remarkable grace, she revives the tradition of the well-crafted personal essay, moving easily from anecdotes about Coleridge and Orwell to tales of her own pathologically literary family. As someone who played at blocks with her father's 22-volume set of Trollope ("My Ancestral Castles") and who only really considered herself married when she and her husband had merged collections ("Marrying Libraries"), she is exquisitely well equipped to expand upon the art of inscriptions, the perverse pleasures of compulsive proof-reading, the allure of long words, and the satisfactions of reading out loud. There is even a foray into pure literary gluttony--Charles Lamb liked buttered muffin crumbs between the leaves, and Fadiman knows of more than one reader who literally consumes page corners. Perfectly balanced between humor and erudition, Ex Libris establishes Fadiman as one of our finest contemporary essayists.

I am sending this off into the world to other friends who are readers. Unfortunately, my brain is broken at the moment and I can't go through the figuring of how to do a ring or a ray or an order. So I will just write down the people who indicated interest in my LJ and ask that each reader select one to send it to as their budgets and desires allow. And when the final name has been sent to that it pass as a friendly RABCK to other readers.

Long live the unstructured ray!

starts with deenbat as my budget won't allow overseas postage. Sorry to the first person who wrote who was teotakuu.

teotakuu /otakuu in New Zealand

buffra USA

newk OZ USA

texaswren USA (after christmas)

allysther USA AFP


maybe fancyhorse USA

Mailing this week to deenbat

This will make a nice winter break read, so it will be on its way to teotakuu in a timely fashion.

winter break read??? Well, that was one of my more optimistic moments.

After hoarding this book for too long and not getting to it, I'm passing it along to teotakuu, with apologies for not getting to it in a timely fashion.

Passed on to me by Deenbat and read by me during my travels from New Hampshire to Colorado.

I enjoyed this book very much and will keep my eyes open for a copy in New Zealand

CONTROLLED RELEASE NOTES:

Although Buffra is next on the list, she is currently in the process of moving so Antof9 is going to read it and pass it on once Buffra is settled

*Caught*

My friend otakuu handed this to me, with the express promise that I pass it on to Buffra next ... when she has her new address :) I love butting in to a ray!

To remind me whose book it is, I wrote on a sticky note and put it inside the front cover (which will be the journal entry picture). Funny -- yellow stickies are getting to be a thing with me and bookczuk!

I have a new favorite book! Like 84, Charing Cross Road, this is a book by a reader, for readers. As I said in the Top 5 Reads for May thread: I can't recommend it highly enough. If you love books, reading, words, literature. .. read it: )

This is the hardest kind of book review to write, because I prefer to reference things I liked and quote favorite passages in my reviews. If I did that for this book, I'd basically reproduce the entire book in my journal entry!

So I'll limit my notes to a few things, like this part on "marrying libraries" I read to my friend Jen when she got to my house 20 minutes after I read it:
His books commingled democratically, united under the all-inclusive flag of Literature. Some were vertical, some horizontal, and some actually placed behind others. Mine were balkanized by nationality and subject matter. Like most people with a high tolerance for clutter, George maintains a basic trust in three-dimensional object. If he wants something, he believes it will present itself, and there it usually does. I, on the other hand, believe that books, maps, scissors, and Scotch tape dispensers are all unreliable vagrants, likely to take off for parts unknown unless strictly confined to quarters. My books, therefore, have always been rigidly regimented. Really, this whole chapter is entertaining, charming, and tells us a lot about the author, and George. And I loved it.

In talking about inheriting books from parents, I both loved what she said, and also became very emotional about my own father and his books. My father died in 1998, and I still look for his copy of Les Misérables when I visit my mom. My dad loved that book, and read it in the original French. He used his copy for one of his many degrees -- this one a minor in French literature, and I remember reading the notes in his handwriting in the margins. Where is this book? It has vanished, and I want it. Can I read French? No, but that's irrelevant. Anne's story makes you smile and cry, too:

Later, of course, I kicked myself for having spurned Turgenev. The four hundred volumes that passed to me (which included the Trollopes but, unfortunately, not Fanny hill) were at first segregated on their own wall, the biliothecal equivalent of a separate in-law apartment.
"You just don't want your father's Hemingways to be sullied by my Stephen Kings," said George accusingly.
"That's not true."
He tried another tack. "Your father wouldn't want his books to be a shrine. Didn't you say he used to let you build castles with them?"
This hit home. I realized that by keeping his library intact, I had hoped I might be able to keep my father, who was then eighty-six, intact as well. It was a strategy unlikely to succeed.

I love this author. I read restaurant menus the same way her family does, I love word games, I love meeting new words, and I love books. The bad thing about reading this particular book is that it makes you want to hoard books ... just when I was getting good at giving them away!

Thanks for letting me jump into this ray, and I'm shocked that I've never read this before. I shall make up for this shortcoming immediately by purchasing multiple copies and spreading them around the world :)

I'll be sending this to Buffra shortly, now that I have her new address.

Two extra things:
1. I thought it really fun to find otakuu's boarding pass and a few other pieces of paper that remind me of her, in this book :)
2. This copy has a note (that I wish I'd written) on page 53: "typo on 'insted'". Wonder if that's been fixed in future editions?

Thank you!

This has the distinction of being the first book caught at my new place. And the one that made me realize it is time to change my BC profile!

:)

I really enjoyed this book and related to much of what Fadiman wrote. At the moment, I don't think I can improve upon Ant's journal entry, so I'm not going to try.

I am unable to send it on its way just yet, but will be sure to do so as soon as I can. Thanks for understanding.