This little book is another in the series I’ll call “Stolen Moments”–in this case reading the short chapters while reading the streetcar to my local destinations.
The overall theme of the essays revolve around the ideas of reading, and books. Fadiman is an excellent writer, which makes each essay even more engaging.
Here are short summaries of each of the essays.
| Marrying Libraries | Two writers and avid readers decide to merge their respective libraries after marrying. It wasn’t easy! |
| The Joy of Sesquipedalians | The joys of living long, and enjoying long words. This essay is full of long words. |
| My Odd Shelf | An odd shelf contains books whose subject is completely unrelated to the rest of the library. Ms. Fadiman’s own odd shelf details voyages by English explores to the polar regions, and she recounts some of these explorer’s stories. |
| Scorn Not the Sonnet | I didn’t get much out of this one. Perhaps I’m not that familiar with the form of a sonnet? |
| Never Do That to a Book | Two contrasting ideas. (1) Keeping books in like new condition, even after reading and (2) Writing, folding, highlighting, even tearing pages out of books in order to understand or share the book’s wisdom. |
| True Womanhood | A chronicle of historical writing about the role of women in society. Fadiman starts with an article written in the late 1800’s, “The True Woman’s Kingdom: The Home”. She then discussed some of the evolution she has found in later writings. |
| Words on a Flyleaf | Inscriptions in books given, books received, and inscriptions from or to renowned authors. A personal favorite is a regional cookbook given to me by my mother. She inscribed it “Mom”. I still don’t understand why she included quotation marks. |
| You Are There | Accounts of famous battles, expeditions or other narratives can be more moving and meaningful if read where the events took place. Powell’s expedition down the Colorado River is an example. Why not read this in the Grand Canyon? |
| The His’er Problem | The author’s personal reflections on encountering the term “Ms.” for the first time in the 1970’s-and subsequently struggling with gender bias in writing. She wonders when is bias a problem, and when is it not? |
| Insert a Carrot, or Carat | Memories of finding mistakes in grammar, spelling, and punctuation. Sometimes the unintended humor is better than the original intent. (example I saw from somewhere else–“I don’t want to be the barrier of bad news”) |
| Eternal Ink | Memories of old fountain pens, typewriters, and quill pens. The author believes that these tools provide a more personal experience than using a computer. |
| The Literary Glutton | Bibliophagy-eating or chewing part of a book. This essay highlights scenes in books that feature food in a prominent way. Not cookbooks, though. |
| Nothing New Under The Sun | An essay about borrowing and plagiarizing-sometimes crediting the original source, sometimes not. “Like most writers, I have long been fascinated by the sea change through which an aggregation of words, common property when scattered throughout a dictionary, is transformed into a stealable asset.” |
| The Catalogical Imperative | Comments on junk mail and catalogues that Fadiman receives. How did she ever get on the mailing list? Sometimes she gets mail intended for others, but for some reason gets sent to her address. |
| My Ancestral Castles | Memories of Fadiman as a young child, building castles and drawbridges with her father’s collection of leather bound books. Now that she has part of her father’s library, her own children are developing an interest in these same books. |
| Sharing the Mayhem | The joy of reading aloud to children, aging parents, or spouses. |
| The PM’s Empire of Books | Fadiman found a pamphlet published in the late 1800’s which provides solutions for home storage of up to 60,000 books. She then wonders how these might work in her Manhattan apartment. |
| Secondhand Prose | A retrospective on the potential treasures to be unearthed at second hand bookstores. |