My books are shelved by subject: F/SF, mystery, children's / YA in fiction, and everything from travel to religion to sociology to linguistics to books about books (one of my favorite sections) and so on. I'm beggingin to think, though, that I need a Fadiman shelf. On it, I could shelve Clifton Fadiman and John S. Major's New Lifetime Reading Plan; Ann Fadiman's wonderful Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader; Theodore H. White's In Search of History, his autobiography, which has a lot about Annalee Jacoby (Clifton's wife, Anne's mother); and my latest acquisition, George Howe Colt's (Ann's husband) The Big House, about his family and the decaying Cape Cod mansion in which they've spent summers for three generations.
Those aren't all the Fadiman books, by a long shot. For example, I have no great desire to buy Anne's bestseller on epilepsy among the Hmong people, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down or Colt's The Enigma of Suicide, just because those aren't subjects I'm as interested in. Clifton F. has any number of other books out, some of which may show up on my shelves someday.
I think I've figured out why the Fadiman books I do have are such favorites of mine: it's because those are books I could write, or at least they're the sort of book I could write. I'm having visions of competence here: I'm not an author, and I'm not claiming I could write a book as good as any of the Fadiman ouevre. But I could write something that would be at least a distant cousin to their work; I could write a book about other books and why or why not they should be read, or a series of essays about my life and the containers -- books or houses -- that have impacted it. It might even be readable. In contrast, I don't think I could write a fantasy novel, or if I did it would be awful. Much as I enjoy reading fiction I don't get the thrumming recognition of myself behind its pages that I do when reading what I am coming to think of as a Fadiman book.
Posted by dichroic at August 4, 2004 04:47 PM