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bloodygranuaileIn lieu of spooky movies, this year’s Halloween viewing was the first season of AMC’s The Terror, a lightly supernatural, heavily researched historical fiction horror series about the lost Franklin expedition, in which the ships Terror and Erebus sailed into the Arctic circle in search of the fabled Northwest Passage and never re-emerged. This was a very big deal at the time and, as the wrecks of the ships were only discovered in 2014 and 2016, continues to be a fairly big deal in certain circles as grisly new pieces of evidence about the fate of expedition emerges, like the confirmation that they are Captain James Fitzjames’ face.
In light of my newfound interest in ill-fated polar expeditions, a friend lent me a copy of Anne Fadiman’s Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader, with the essay “My Odd Shelf” bookmarked. “My Odd Shelf” is about Fadiman’s collection of polar exploration literature, which consists of 64 volumes. As a newbie to polar exploration, I found this short essay to be packed full of interesting new information about it, even though the purpose of the essay was more to explain the concept of the Odd Shelf. (I don’t know what my Odd Shelf is, actually; maybe several of my shelves are odd.) I also did find the concept of the Odd Shelf interesting, and Fadiman’s musings on hers, her husband’s, and various polar explorers’ Odd Shelves to be endearing. After reading this charming essay I decided to read the other ones.
These are very personal essays, and as such it must be said that it was abundantly clear to me that, despite our mutual bibliophilia, Fadiman and I are clearly very different people. In addition to the obvious stuff–she’s married, has children, is a couple of decades older than I am, and lives in a loft in Manhattan–we also have some stark differences in the particular flavor of Book People that we are. Fadiman and her family don’t seem to be big genre readers–apart from one offhand mention of her father’s collection of science fiction novels as “junk,” there are no mentions whatsoever of anything that could be classed as speculative fiction. In “The Joy of Sesquipidalians,” an essay about long, rare, and obsolete words, Fadiman lists grimoire alongside words like adapertile and apozemical as one she’d reached adulthood never hearing and that nobody else in her extremely erudite circle of professional word nerds had either. As someone whose entire social circle, even the less literarily inclined ones, consists of fantasy nerds and gamers, I found this very discordant. Who doesn’t know what a grimoire is? (Someone who’d rather read a Toyota Corolla user’s manual than learn that fantasy novels even exist, I suppose.) I don’t even remember where I did learn the term; it shows up in all sorts of goofy witch books for children I read when I was nine.
The Fadimans–all of them, apparently–are also the sorts of physically active readers who like to make annotations, dog-ear pages, and leave books open facedown on their bedside tables, and I am not. While I have spilled my fair share of tea on my fair share of pages, I like fancy leatherbound paperbacks and complete matching sets, and am increasingly only purchasing books if they will make a nice objet d’art on my shelves; otherwise, why pass up the two twenty-minute walks through historic downtown Salem that come with getting it from the library? (I also get the sense that Fadiman, being from an older and more financially stable generation, did not run the gauntlet of frequent apartment moves that marked my early adulthood, and has thus forced me to be more selective in the books that I have retained ownership of than I will ever be quite happy with. What on Earth possessed me to give away my Anne Rice Vampire Chronicles novels, honestly.)
That said, there was still much here that was indeed Relevant To My Interests. The urgency of buying very specific old books in secondhand shops, and the stark contrast with the commodified reliability of buying new books in normal bookstores, was very relatable to me, as a person who is trying to save space in her tiny condo and get more steps in by getting all her normal books from the public library like a responsible public-minded member of the community and not a greedy cave-dwelling book dragon. The essay on William Gladstone’s invention of rolling compact shelving, “The P.M.’s Empire of Books,” was also fascinating for just that reason. The essays on reading books in the places they were written or are about, and on eating while reading, both appealed to me as a similar type of atmospheric reader, although Fadiman does not render any opinion on reading books by seasonality, which is the kind of atmospherics I find myself indulging in the most (probably because I can’t afford to travel a lot to read all the books that take place outside New England).
Despite being a bit dated, and the wholesale snub to the existence of the fantasy genre, I did end up liking this book quite a lot, and made sure to photograph the list of sesquipidalians from that essay so I can make sure I commit them all (except grimoire, for which there is no need) to memory.
In light of my newfound interest in ill-fated polar expeditions, a friend lent me a copy of Anne Fadiman’s Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader, with the essay “My Odd Shelf” bookmarked. “My Odd Shelf” is about Fadiman’s collection of polar exploration literature, which consists of 64 volumes. As a newbie to polar exploration, I found this short essay to be packed full of interesting new information about it, even though the purpose of the essay was more to explain the concept of the Odd Shelf. (I don’t know what my Odd Shelf is, actually; maybe several of my shelves are odd.) I also did find the concept of the Odd Shelf interesting, and Fadiman’s musings on hers, her husband’s, and various polar explorers’ Odd Shelves to be endearing. After reading this charming essay I decided to read the other ones.
These are very personal essays, and as such it must be said that it was abundantly clear to me that, despite our mutual bibliophilia, Fadiman and I are clearly very different people. In addition to the obvious stuff–she’s married, has children, is a couple of decades older than I am, and lives in a loft in Manhattan–we also have some stark differences in the particular flavor of Book People that we are. Fadiman and her family don’t seem to be big genre readers–apart from one offhand mention of her father’s collection of science fiction novels as “junk,” there are no mentions whatsoever of anything that could be classed as speculative fiction. In “The Joy of Sesquipidalians,” an essay about long, rare, and obsolete words, Fadiman lists grimoire alongside words like adapertile and apozemical as one she’d reached adulthood never hearing and that nobody else in her extremely erudite circle of professional word nerds had either. As someone whose entire social circle, even the less literarily inclined ones, consists of fantasy nerds and gamers, I found this very discordant. Who doesn’t know what a grimoire is? (Someone who’d rather read a Toyota Corolla user’s manual than learn that fantasy novels even exist, I suppose.) I don’t even remember where I did learn the term; it shows up in all sorts of goofy witch books for children I read when I was nine.
The Fadimans–all of them, apparently–are also the sorts of physically active readers who like to make annotations, dog-ear pages, and leave books open facedown on their bedside tables, and I am not. While I have spilled my fair share of tea on my fair share of pages, I like fancy leatherbound paperbacks and complete matching sets, and am increasingly only purchasing books if they will make a nice objet d’art on my shelves; otherwise, why pass up the two twenty-minute walks through historic downtown Salem that come with getting it from the library? (I also get the sense that Fadiman, being from an older and more financially stable generation, did not run the gauntlet of frequent apartment moves that marked my early adulthood, and has thus forced me to be more selective in the books that I have retained ownership of than I will ever be quite happy with. What on Earth possessed me to give away my Anne Rice Vampire Chronicles novels, honestly.)
That said, there was still much here that was indeed Relevant To My Interests. The urgency of buying very specific old books in secondhand shops, and the stark contrast with the commodified reliability of buying new books in normal bookstores, was very relatable to me, as a person who is trying to save space in her tiny condo and get more steps in by getting all her normal books from the public library like a responsible public-minded member of the community and not a greedy cave-dwelling book dragon. The essay on William Gladstone’s invention of rolling compact shelving, “The P.M.’s Empire of Books,” was also fascinating for just that reason. The essays on reading books in the places they were written or are about, and on eating while reading, both appealed to me as a similar type of atmospheric reader, although Fadiman does not render any opinion on reading books by seasonality, which is the kind of atmospherics I find myself indulging in the most (probably because I can’t afford to travel a lot to read all the books that take place outside New England).
Despite being a bit dated, and the wholesale snub to the existence of the fantasy genre, I did end up liking this book quite a lot, and made sure to photograph the list of sesquipidalians from that essay so I can make sure I commit them all (except grimoire, for which there is no need) to memory.