Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader by Anne Fadiman

nearest larder. Accounts of Arctic and Antarctic expeditions are crammed with such figmental menus. In 1883, on Adolphus Greely’s ill-fated scientific expedition to Ellesmere Island, Lieutenant James B. Lockwood kept a list of the dishes he missed most: turkey stuffed with oysters, Boston pilot bread, oatmeal muffins, corn fritters. “Chewed up a foot of a fox this evening raw,” he wrote in his journal. “It was altogether bone and gristle.” He followed that entry with: “Pie of orange and coconut.” On Ernest Shackleton’s 1914–17 Antarctic expedition, Dr. James McIlroy conducted a poll of the twentv-two men who were stranded on Elephant Island, asking each what he would choose if he were permitted a single dish. The sweet-cravers outnumbered the savory-cravers by a large margin. A sampling:
     
Clark
Devonshire dumpling with cream
James
Syrup pudding
Mcllroy
Marmalade pudding with Devonshire cream
Rickenson
Blackberry and apple tart with cream
Wild
Apple pudding and cream
Hussey
Porridge, sugar, and cream
Green
Apple dumpling
Greenstreet
Christmas pudding
Kerr
Dough and syrup
Macklin
Scrambled eggs on toast
Bakewell
Baked pork and beans
Cheetham
Pork, apple sauce, potatoes, and turnips
    As a member of civilized society, the closest I’ve come to these cravings has been during my pregnancies, when the siren call of gluttony has been both irresistible and permissible. One night, when I was pregnant with Henry, I lay in bed thinking, for some reason, about
Treasure Island
. I realized that from the entire book there was only one sentence I remembered verbatim, something that Ben Gunn, who has been marooned for three years, says to Jim Hawkins: “Many’s the long night I’ve dreamed of cheese—toasted, mostly.” I repeated the last two words over and over, like a mantra. “Toasted, mostly. Toasted, mostly. Toasted, mostly.” Then I found myself drifting toward the kitchen as if in a somnambulist’s trance. I opened the refrigerator. In one of the drawers there was a lump of cheddar. I dropped it in a Teflon pan, turned up the flame, and bashed the cheese with a large spoon. This wasn’t cooking, unless you call what a Neanderthal did to his haunch of woolly mammoth over a bonfire cooking. When the cheese was reduced to a molten glob, I ate it from the pan. Was it good? I don’t know. It went down too fast.
    Since then, I have wondered whether this in utero experience, which resulted in a terrible stomachache, was responsible for two of my son’s most salient characteristics. He loves books. He hates cheese.

 T H E  C A T A L O G I G A L  I M P E R A T I V E  
    O n the cover of a recent Nordstrom catalogue—don’t ask me why—there is a photograph of a billy goat. He is standing on a burlap bag in the back of a pickup truck, eating a red carnation that he has just plucked from a green plastic flowerpot. The goat looks pleased with his meal, but the omnivorous glint in his eye suggests that if no carnations were available, he would be willing to settle for the burlap bag, the plastic flowerpot, or even the pickup truck.
    I know that glint, because that’s how I feel about reading. I’d rather have a book, but in a pinch I’ll settle for a set of Water Pik instructions. I have spent many a lonely night in small-town motel rooms consoled by the Yellow Pages. Once, long ago, I bested a desperate bout of insomnia by studying the only piece of written material in my apartment that I had not already read at least twice: my roommate’s 1974 Toyota Corolla manual. Under the circumstances (addiction, withdrawal, craving, panic), the section on the manual gearshift was as beautiful to me as Dante’s vision of the Sempiternal Rose in canto XXXI of the
Paradiso
.
    There is only one form of non-literature, however, that I would sometimes
prefer
to the
Paradiso
. It is—I realize that I am about to deal my image a blow from which it may never recover—the mail-order catalogue. In fact, I consumed the