Odyssey Online

…Anne Fadiman is an essayist, and is, simply put, a lot of fun to read.  She wrote a book titled Ex Libris about her (and her family’s) life long love of books.  It’s a great read, and in the last essay in this volume she recommends her favorite books about books, reading, and book collecting. This is a sampling of those titles that are here in ODY:

• Reading in Bed by John Wieners
• History of Reading by Alberto Manguel
• Kingdom of Books by William Dana Orcutt
• ABC for Book Collectors by John Carter
• A Gentle Madness, Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes and an Eternal Passion for Books by Nicholas Basbanes
• Size of Thoughts by Nicholson Baker
• The Common Reader by Virginia Woolf

Read on!

…well perhaps things like our Encore search (and Google) do de-emphasize subject headings…but…the wonders subject headings can bring. Take gastronomy for example. A subject search on gastronomy brings back this fine…dare I say tasty…list for weekend reading:

• American Fried: Adventures of a Happy Eater by Calvin Trillin
• The Artful Eater: A Gourmet Investigates the Ingredients of Great Food by Edward Behr
• Coming Home to Eat: The Pleasures and Politics of Local Food by Gary Paul Nabhan
• Eating in Eden: Food and American Utopias edited by Etta Mattan and Martha Finch
• The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food by Jennifer Lee
• Insatiable: Tales from a Life of Delicious Excess by Gael Greene
• The Raw and the Cooked: Adventures of a Roving Gourmand by Jim Harrison

…and that is but a smorgasbord of the thirty five titles on the list. I’m off to lunch.