Love beyond words
The writer Anne Fadiman made a confession Sunday evening to a roomful of shocked Cambridge Public Library patrons. It was a tale of familial abuse — of the bookshelf, that is. In her childhood home, books were subjected to an “assault on innocent pages we viewed as a form of love,” said Fadiman, an essayist and the author of “The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down.” The Fadimans don’t just read books, she said: “We live with them, we live through them, we live among them, and we sometimes live under them.” Fadiman, the Francis Writer-in-Residence at Yale University and a member of Harvard’s Board of Overseers, explored the varieties of book lover in “Using Bacon for Bookmarks: How Readers Treat Their Books.” The talk was a fitting installment in the John Harvard Book Celebration, a semester-long series of events at Cambridge and Boston public libraries in honor of Harvard’s 375th anniversary...