Murder by Death

I loved this from first word to last.  A collection of essays first published in Civilization, each about some facet of the love of books or the written word.

Her first essay, Marrying Libraries started the collection off on a high note with me; after 10 years together, I still can't quite embrace the marriage of my books with MT's: he has his shelves and I, mine.  I've only recently (last weekend) catalogued his books in my database software; until that point neither of us knew what he had or didn't.

Other highpoints of the collection for me included Never Do That To a Book, My Ancestral Castles and Secondhand Prose.  Fadiman's essay on plagiarism was...interesting.  I'm fairly sure it's heavily satirical, (it's 10 pages long and has 38 footnotes, some rather absurd) but reading it, it is clear that she has strong feelings about the theft of other people's work.  I was left with the feeling that she felt conflicted about such a sticky subject.  She has also written an outstanding essay on compulsive proofreading, whose title includes those handwritten edits that are impossible to reproduce on a screen with nothing but a keyboard.  But it's one of my top three favourites of the book.

Ex Libris wraps up with a small chapter of recommended reading; a list of books about books; a list I'll be using in the next few days as I look for more titles to add to my TBR.