20 Books of Summer, 4–7: Fadiman; Kingsolver & O’Farrell Rereads; Sullivan
I finished several of these a while ago now, but it’s been a struggle to summon up the motivation to write about them, especially during the heat wave we’re currently experiencing in the southern half of England. You’ve heard a lot from me recently as I’ve been catching up on reviews, so I’ll try to keep these responses to one (long) paragraph each.
Frog and Other Essays by Anne Fadiman (2026)
This was one of my Most Anticipated titles of the year because I’ve loved Fadiman’s nonfiction, especially the bookish Ex Libris, which I’ve read twice. Her essays are warm and fluent, braiding memoir and observation in a natural way and drawing readers in whether they share her particular preoccupations or not. “Frog” is about her guilt for not being more attentive to her children’s surprisingly long-lived pet frog, Bunky; “South Polar Times” recounts her obsession with polar exploration and what she discovered in the archives of the magazine Shackleton produced in the 1910s. At the centre of the book is a triptych on modern technology (“My Old Printer”) and language use, especially as she’s experienced it as a Yale professor trying to adjust to pandemic-era teaching (“Screen Share”) and expanded gender possibilities (“All My Pronouns,” which is mostly about getting used to “they” as a singular pronoun for nonbinary individuals). What a relief that advancing age and pedantry didn’t see her joining the anti-woke camp. The final essay, “Yes to Everything,” was – I think – the afterword to her late student Marina Keegan’s The Opposite of Loneliness (2014). For me the highlight was “The Oakling and the Oak,” about Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s disappointing son (“A penumbra of impossible expectation began to settle around Hartley’s head”). There’s a tantalizing parallel here with her own sense of needing to live up to her literary father, Clifton Fadiman, that I wish she’d explored further. So: good stuff here, but only seven essays, all of which were originally published elsewhere. It feels like scraping the barrel. And why the laudatory foreword by someone I’ve never heard of (Sam Anderson)? I ordered this while in the States to get to a free-shipping limit and I’m glad I got the chance to read it, but it’s not a must. Do seek out “Frog” and “Oak,” though. (New purchase – Target.com) 
Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver (2000)
In all her life Lusa had never seen such an oversexed, muggy summer. Just breathing was a torrid proposition.
Although I remembered this as being in Kingsolver’s top tier of novels, I recalled no details beyond a female ranger who lives in the woods, has an affair with a hunter, and studies coyotes (actually, I thought it was wolves – I was conflating Deanna’s surname, Wolfe, and Sarah Hall’s The Wolf Border, which has a similar setup). I’d forgotten that there are two other strands: Lusa, a Polish-Palestinian entomologist widowed young, inherits her husband’s family farm and tries to make a go of goat breeding despite others’ disapproval; and Garnett, a pious old man trying to resurrect the American chestnut after it was wiped out by blight, has an ongoing low-key feud with his organic orchard-keeping neighbour, Nannie. These threads rotate under the headings “Predators,” “Moth Love,” and “Old Chestnuts.” There are pleasing connections between the main characters, who are also thematically linked by ideological disagreements and the possibility of new life and romance when age or circumstances seemed to disqualify them. Kingsolver writes brilliantly about science, and although she gets a little preachy through Nannie, in a way that presages Unsheltered (“It’s glory, to be part of a bigger something. The glory of an evolving world”), her environmentalist messages are always right on. It’s depressing to note that, more than a quarter-century later, the issues she raises related to food production and pesticide use are worse rather than better. Like Margaret Atwood, she’s a literary prophet of our time. I’m nearly halfway through her upcoming novel, Partita, for a Shelf Awareness review and its protagonist, Livia, seems to be in the lineage of Deanna – an Appalachian girl who tries to exceed her origins. This was a big ol’ satisfying summer read. Whyever didn’t Kingsolver win the Women’s Prize for this one? (Little Free Library)
My original rating: 
My rating now: 
Poolside reading at my nephew’s graduation party.
The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox by Maggie O’Farrell (2006)
Nothing is our own. We begin in the world as anagrams of our antecedents.
Another reread. I remembered the mental hospital element but think I may have otherwise had this confused with Sebastian Barry’s The Secret Scripture, which also features historical family secrets and a great big twist. This was our book club selection for June, and although I missed the meeting (which was also our summer social) while I was back visiting my family, I wanted to catch up by reading it again – especially after it earned a perfect score from the rest of the group! In the novel’s present day, vintage clothing store owner Iris is having an affair with a married man and learns that she has a ‘mad’ great-aunt who will soon be her responsibility when the hospital Esme has called home for 60 years closes. Why did Iris’s grandmother, Kitty, hide that she had a sister? With Kitty on a dementia ward, she can’t ask outright. Instead, narration alternates between the sisters’ growing-up years in India and Edinburgh – where flighty, rebellious Esme caught boys’ eyes while obedient Kitty didn’t – and Iris and Esme embarking on a tentative relationship. The use of the present tense for both, as well as the fragments of memory we gradually work out are Kitty’s, create a continuous narrative so gripping that I could easily have consumed it in one sitting had I not had other commitments. Grief, parenting, male privilege, family legacies, and a freedom of spirit that might today be branded neurodivergence are strong elements. It’s appalling how women have been punished for breaking the rules, but the other ensuing betrayals are just as shocking. This must have one of THE best surprise endings out there. I can’t believe I’d forgotten the details. After a couple of lacklustre early novels, O’Farrell’s career truly took off with this one. Now to reread her other gems. (Borrowed from a book club friend)
My original rating:
My rating now: 
Commencement by J. Courtney Sullivan (2009)
Smith had left its mark on her, so that the place would always feel like home
I’ve had a mixed experience with Sullivan’s novels, but this debut was a delight. Let’s start with the clever title: An American graduation ceremony is called “commencement,” so it marks both an ending and a beginning. For four friends who meet at Smith College, a women-only institution, in the late 1990s, their student experiences have effects that carry on into their ‘real’ lives afterwards. We watch how their relationships with each other, and with family members and partners, shift over the course of nearly a decade. Sally arrives on campus bereft from the death of her mother, but she doesn’t let her sadness corrode her ambition or her kind heart. Bree is engaged to a man when she comes up from Savannah but leaves in a committed relationship with a woman. April was raised by a single mother and has always been a strident feminist, but graduates with plans to go to extremes in drawing attention to the plight of sex workers. The framing story of the friends gathering for Sally’s wedding introduces us first to Celia, who is in some sense still living the student life in the small New York City apartment she brings one-night stands back to after drunken evenings. The wedding ends up in a huge fight between the four, and as the years pass they split off into pairs and trios of loyalty before a crisis brings them back together. It’s a little far-fetched how this all plays out, but I was invested enough in all four characters that I was happy to go along with it. Sullivan went to Smith (I also attended what was a women’s college at the time, Hood), so you have to wonder if anything was autobiographical for her. She weaves in various women’s issues, such as sexual assault and decisions about career and motherhood. I applaud Sullivan for mentioning support for trans men on campus, though her discussion does seem of its time and today I think the debate would be more around allowing trans women to attend. I chose this to read because my recent USA trip was for my nephew’s high school graduation. It’s perfect for Curtis Sittenfeld fans. (Secondhand purchase – 2nd & Charles)
Ex Libris x 2: Who Wears It Better, Anne Fadiman or Michiko Kakutani?
When I heard about the new book by Michiko Kakutani, former chief book critic of the New York Times, I rushed to put it on my wish list – though I ended up accessing it via the library instead. I also felt a hankering to reread Anne Fadiman’s essay collection by the same title, so I ordered myself a secondhand copy earlier this year. Both books are by (more or less) famous New York City bibliophiles and take old-fashioned bookplate designs as an inspiration. Here’s how the two fared in a head-to-head battle.
Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader by Anne Fadiman (1998)
Like many a bibliophile, I have a soft spot for books about books. However, I’m also a real stickler about them, because all too often they make common mistakes: they’re too generic or too obscure in their points of reference, they slip into plot summary and include spoilers, or they alienate the reader by presenting the author as being on another echelon.
Fadiman, though, is a very relatable narrator in these expanded versions of 18 essays originally written for publication in Civilization, the Library of Congress magazine published from 1994 to 2000. (Can you imagine, your own bookish column in which you could write whatever you like?!) Her father was the well-known intellectual Clifton Fadiman. Theirs was a family of book-obsessed, vocabulary-loving, trivia-spouting readers, and she was also crafting her own with her husband and two young children.
I saw my family – especially my mother and me – in a number of these pieces: in “The Joy of Sesquipedalians,” about the love of obscure words and word games played on a board or along with the TV (I was a spelling bee champion, and we’re all Scrabble fiends to a greater or lesser extent), in “Insert a Caret [Inset a Carrot],” about compulsive proofreading, in “The Catalogical Imperative,” about a build-up of print catalogues and the different selves one can imagine using the products therein, and in “Secondhand Prose,” about collecting used books.
There’s one respect in which I differ from the Fadiman family, though. Tom Mole’s The Secret Life of Books had reminded me of Fadiman’s division of readers into “courtly” and “carnal” lovers of books: the courtly ones keep a book pristine, while the carnal ones use and abuse them however they wish. She introduces this piece with an episode from a family trip to Copenhagen when she was a teenager. Her brother left a book open, facedown, on the bedside table at their hotel and the next day they found that the chambermaid had carefully put a marker at the right page, closed the book, and set a note on top reading, “Sir, you must never do that to a book.” I wholeheartedly agree. While I always say “your books, your rules” to other readers, I would have to suppress a cringe if I witnessed dog-earing, reading in the bath, cracking the spine, tearing out pages, doodling in the margins, and so on.
What I can get on board with, though, is the love of books as both narratives and physical objects. In the former camp, you get essays on books about polar exploration, sonnets, outdated guides to femininity, food literature, and reading aloud. On the latter, you’ll hear about her New York City apartment groaning with books absorbed from her husband’s and father’s collections, the good and bad of inscriptions, and Prime Minister William Gladstone’s tips for storing books.
Two essays have not aged well: one on a beloved pen (though she acknowledges that this was already multiply outdated by that time, by the typewriter and then by the computer she now uses for composition) and especially one on the quandary of gender-neutral pronouns (as opposed to “every man for himself” types of constructions) – nowadays we have no qualms about employing “them” for the unknown and the nonbinary.
My favorite essay overall was “You Are There,” about the special joy of reading on location. Additional irony points for Joe Biden being mentioned in the piece on plagiarism! I’d read this from a library some years before. I enjoyed it just as much the second time around, and certain essays will reward additional future rereadings, too.
My original rating (c. 2008): 
My rating now:
Ex Libris: 100+ Books to Read and Reread by Michiko Kakutani (2020)
In my more morbid moments, when I imagine how I would approach the remainder of my life if I knew that I was going to die young of a terminal illness, I think about self-publishing a selection of my best blog posts and book reviews. A personal greatest hits, if you would, and anyone could forgive the self-indulgence because, hey, she’s probably going to die soon. But then I open a book like this and realize that a collection of book reviews can actually be pretty tedious, even when written by one of the greats.
“Like all lists and anthologies, the selections here are subjective and decidedly arbitrary,” Kakutani warns in her introduction. What this means in practice is that: a) if I’d read a particular book, I didn’t need to read a ~1000-word review of it; b) if I hadn’t read the book but wanted to, I avoided the essay in fear of spoilers (e.g. she does reveal some specific incidents from Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club, which I have on the shelf and was looking forward to; I’ll just wait until I’ve forgotten); and c) if I hadn’t read the book and didn’t want to (there is LOTS of history and politics here, with plenty of Trump jabs shoehorned in; you do know her only previous book was a diatribe against Trump, right?), I wasn’t interested. So, while there were a few pieces I appreciated, such as one on the enduring appeal of The Great Gatsby, which I recently read a third time for book club, not many caught my eye as I skimmed the book.
In any case, it’s not a book for reading all the way through but one for having on the coffee table to read the occasional essay. It is gorgeously put together, what with Dana Tanamachi’s illustrations in the style of vintage bookplates, so would still be a lovely reference book to have around. Think of it as a collection of amuse-bouches to whet your appetite to read the books you’ve always meant to pick up but haven’t managed yet (for me, that would be As I Lay Dying and Mason & Dixon). See Susan’s more judicious review here.
My rating: 
I found plenty of other books on Goodreads with the title Ex Libris, such as this one, a compendium of library-themed fantasy and science fiction stories. (Yes, really.)
Bookish Beck = Rebecca Foster. American transplant to England. Freelance proofreader and book reviewer.
Bookish Beck 