writerjenn

"It has long been my belief that everyone's library contains an Odd Shelf.  On this shelf rests a small, mysterious corpus of volumes whose subject matter is completely unrelated to the rest of the library, yet which, upon closer inspection, reveals a good deal about its owner."

This is from Anne Fadiman's book EX LIBRIS, which I urge you to rush out and read immediately.  It's one of my favorite books about reading/writing/books in general.  This quotation, however, doesn't go far enough in the case of my library, which seems to have Odd Shelf after Odd Shelf.  Anyone looking at my books may well wonder how many different people they belong to.  The bookcase in our den boasts perhaps the strangest collection of bedfellows: humor and essays on the top shelves, shading downward to travel essays and stories (I am a sucker for any book about a writer going to live in another country, especially if that writer has a sense of humor), a smattering of true crime (guilty pleasure), biographies (mostly about Beat writers), science-related books, and then my books on the Manhattan Project (I know, I know, it was technically not called the Manhattan Project), with the bottom shelf occupied by books about the Lewis and Clark Expedition (which was not called the Lewis and Clark Expedition either, but the Corps of Discovery).  As if you needed further proof that I will read practically anything, I recently read a book about the perfume industry.  I don't even wear perfume.

At least half of what I read now is YA, because that's largely what I'm writing now.  But I read other books for fun, to learn things, to expose myself to a wide range of styles and voices.  I retain a special fondness for the literary short story, examples of which fill several shelves in my living room.  Looking at these shelves and trying to make sense of them, I think my interest in the dawn of the nuclear age and the Lewis and Clark Expedition stems from a single root: a fascination with those moments in history when a paradigm shift is occurring, and a fascination with the real human beings who participated in those moments.  Life is so complex that, in exploring one facet of it after another, I have developed multiple Odd Shelves.

Anne Fadiman's Odd Shelf contains books about polar exploration, and she writes with great passion about that topic.  Do you have an Odd Shelf, and if so, what's on it?

Every time I look up a word in the dictionary, I get side-tracked.  Recently, I became enchanted by the page of my dictionary on which the words teosinte, tepefy, tephra, tequila, teraphim, tercet, terebinth, terete, tergum, teriyaki, and Termagant appear.  It was almost like a list poem.  Tonight, while looking up something else, I found tourbillion.

I love these words not only for their sound and meaning, but for their variety.  My dictionary lists them as deriving from Nahuatl, Latin, Greek, Japanese, and Old French, among others.  And just look at the derivation for teraphim: Middle English theraphym < Ecclesiastic Late Latin theraphim < Greek theraphin < Hebrew terafim.  English is wonderful this way: we get our words from everywhere.

In her wonderful book of essays, EX LIBRIS: CONFESSIONS OF A COMMON READER, Anne Fadiman writes about finding a series of unfamiliar vocabulary words in a book she's reading, and testing her family and friends to see how many they can define.  (While she enjoys the quiz immensely, having grown up watching G. E. College Bowl, her test subjects don't always respond with the same enthusiasm.)  In the Fadiman spirit, I will not give the definitions for my own word list here.  Instead, I will leave you the thrill of first determining how many you already know (I confess that I knew only 4), and then the joy of looking them up and becoming lost in your own dictionary pages.

And if you need any further proof of my geekiness, I will tell you where my beloved dictionary, which started all this, came from:  I won it in a school spelling bee.