Although I’m suspicious of books about books, especially those that seem just to be a glorified form of list, I do recommend Anne Fadiman’s collection of essays, Ex Libris, which came out in 1998. It would, I think, be worth tracking down for one essay alone: Marrying Libraries, in which Fadiman describes, five years after getting hitched, her efforts to merge her books with those of her husband, George. Not only was there the problem of duplicates, the vexed question of whose copy of Middlemarch or Catcher in the Rye deserved to stay, and whose to go; organisation was an issue, too. For while Fadiman liked to Balkanise by nationality and subject matter, favouring a chronological arrangement within each category, George was more laissez-faire. Across the Mason-Dixon Line that separated the two collections in their loft, his books were to be found in a state of near chaos.
Years ago, I asked Fadiman to write an essay about holiday reading, the planning of, for the magazine at which I was then an editor. “I’m too busy,” she said, down the line from New York. “But, oh… I want to write it so much!” Her voice sounded trembly, uncertain. It was clear that she had a lot on her plate. But it was also obvious how tempting she found the idea. This was, you understand, long before the arrival of the Kindle. In the silence that followed, I could almost hear her brain working, the slight panic as she pictured a pile of paperbacks in her mind’s eye.
I understood it perfectly. I do own a Kindle, but I’ve never taken to it, for which reason the planning of my holiday reading remains a protracted, agonising business. With a week to go, I’m not there yet; two near certs were summarily dismissed only last week, when a publisher sent me both the new Jay McInerney, Bright, Precious Days, and the new Ann Patchett, Commonwealth (hardbacks, alas, but what can you do?). They join Anthony Trollope’s The Warden (I’m a Trollope virgin), Sarah Perry’s historical novel, The Essex Serpent, Margo Jefferson’s memoir of elite black America, Negroland, and Peter Parker’s hefty study of an English poet, Housman Country. What? Honestly, don’t worry. I’ll lift that bag if it kills me.
