Book #8: At Large and At Small by Anne Fadiman

Okay, here's book 3 by Anne Fadiman that I've read (Ex Libris and Rereadings are the others). And oh man, I have really enjoyed her writing style. And I totally and completely love this genre that she's writing in in this book--the familiar essay. I actually took a class called The Familiar Essay when I was at BYU--it was an English elective class that I took for my major, and I just signed up for it because it fit my schedule and it sounded interesting, not because I really even knew what a familiar essay was. But man oh man, I was in luck that semester because I just loved the whole idea behind the familiar essay. Fadiman describes it like this: "The familiar essayist didn't speak to the millions; he spoke to one reader, as if the two of them were sitting side by side in front of a crackling fire with their cravats loosened, their favorite stimulants at hand, and a long evening of conversation stretching before them. His viewpoint was subjective, his frame of reference concrete, his style digressive, his eccentricities conspicuous, and his laughter usually at his own expense. And though he wrote about himself, he also wrote about a subject, something with which he was so familiar, and about which he was often so enthusiastic, that his words were suffused with a lover's intimacy" (x). It's a cross between a critical essay and a personal essay, where there is equal parts brain and heart, where you get to know your author as well as your subject as you read. That semester in the Familiar Essay class, I read plenty of historical familiar essays, by Thomas de Quincey and Samuel Coleridge and Charles Lamb, but it was really a pleasure to read some current familiar essays from today's time period and with a modern writing style that was very intriguing and engaging. In each of her essays, Fadiman wove a beautiful story, interspersing her own background with information from other sources, so that I really did feel like I got a good balance of brain and heart while reading her.

The other thing I did in that Familiar Essays class was write my own familiar essay about me. Now I kind of want to go back and revisit it and try it again.