Fadiman has an interesting turn of phrase that is overshadowed by a general sense of haughtiness. There's entirely too much pearl-clutching over petty things (the horror she feels about someone who organizes their books by color and shape is overwrought). After finishing the second essay "The Joy of Sesquipedalians", I think I have discovered the disconnect between her love of reading, books and words and my own: she tends to look wistfully backward onto the "classics" and regards newer things with half-hearted enthusiasm at best. Her feelings on new linguistic changes and vocabulary brought to us with internet usage ("positively mephitic") grind uncomfortably against my own.

Regardless, she did have one particular point that I could vibe with:

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.

Through her interest in polar exploration, I did learn that if you should get your hand stuck to cold metal, you should pee on it. So this wasn't a complete loss.