A Reader on Reading »

Alberto Manguel is one of the world's great readers. He is a member of PEN, a Guggenheim Fellow, and an Officer of the French Order of Arts and Letters. He has been the recipient of numerous prizes, including the Prix Médicis in essays for A History of Reading, and the McKitterick Prize for his novel News from a Foreign Country Came. Among his most recent books is The Library at Night, also published by Yale University Press. His work has been translated into more than thirty languages.

In this major collection of his essays, Alberto Manguel, whom George Steiner has called “the Casanova of reading,”  argues that the activity of reading, in its broadest sense, defines our species. “We come into the world intent on finding narrative in everything,” writes Manguel, “landscape, the skies, the faces of others, the images and words that our species create.” Reading our own lives and those of others, reading the societies we live in and those that lie beyond our borders, reading the worlds that lie between the covers of a book are the essence of A Reader on Reading.

The thirty-nine essays in this volume explore the crafts of reading and writing, the identity granted to us by literature, the far-reaching shadow of Jorge Luis Borges, to whom Manguel read as a young man, and the links between politics and books and between books and our bodies. The powers of censorship and intellectual curiosity, the art of translation, and those “numinous memory palaces we call libraries” also figure in this remarkable collection. For Manguel and his readers, words, in spite of everything, lend coherence to the world and offer us “a few safe places, as real as paper and as bracing as ink,” to grant us room and board in our passage.

The Barnes & Noble Review

The range of A Reader on Reading is in itself as intriguing as that of a good library. Here are reflections on the shape of the page, the full-stop at the end of the sentence, and the first person singular ("I"); on erotic literature, word games (e.g. charade sentences: "Flamingo pale, scenting a latent shark/ Flaming opalescent in gala tents—hark!"), and the ideal reader; on  the story of Jonah and the Whale, Beatrice's smile in Dante's Paradiso, "How Pinocchio Learned to Read," and the comforts of "Don Quixote." All are thoughtful, benevolent, serenely learned.