#37: At Large and At Small: Familiar Essays by Anne Fadiman
I’m such an Anne Fadiman fangirl, you don’t even know—I even named the two main characters in a humorous collection of connected short stories that I may or may not try to get published someday Anne and George after Fadiman and her husband, the writer George Colt, and the premise of the collection (at least, the first story in it) I borrowed from one of the essays in Fadiman’s excellent little book, Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader, which I often give as a gift to bookish people of my acquaintance (so maybe if you know me and your birthday’s coming up in, oh, the next six months, hold off on purchasing this, ‘kay?) because it is SO DAMN DELIGHTFUL—and this little collection of essays was wonderful, full of Fadiman’s trademark wit and her calm, reasonable voice on topics as wide ranging as the Arctic explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson (polar exploration is one of Fadiman’s pet interests), the Romantic poet (and infamous opium addict) Samuel Taylor Coleridge, lepidoptery, coffee, ice cream, and moving to the country.
