A Reader on Reading

A Reader on Reading

Alberto Manguel

Language: English

Pages: 320

ISBN: 030015982X

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

useful this notion is to address a question that troubles me: How does the perception of who I am affect my perception of the world around me? How important is it for Alice to know who she is (the Victorian child that the world perceives her to be) when wandering through the Looking-Glass Wood? Apparently, very important, since this knowledge determines her relationship to the other creatures she encounters. For instance, having forgotten who she is, Alice can become friends with a fawn who has

forgiveness, to admit that they are rational beings guilty of willful cruelty and destructive acts. But tales can be told and books can be written about them that might allow for a certain understanding of what they have done and for a judicious empathy. Their deeds bear no rational explanation, follow absurd logical rules, but their madness and their terror can be trapped for us, in all their consuming and illuminating fire, inside stories or “maps” where they can mysteriously lend our folly a

books except the one I had been reading that morning, Cees Nooteboom’s delightful In the Dutch Mountains, which I finished in the next few hours. To spend the following fourteen days convalescing in a hospital without any reading material seemed to me a torture too great to bear, so when my partner suggested getting from my library a few books, I seized the opportunity gratefully. But which books did I want? The author of Ecclesiastes and Pete Seeger have taught us that for everything there is a

of Eros and Psyche; vs. pornography; universal library Erzenga, Hovhannés d’ (Blouz) Esmenard, Francis Exile, and perseverance of memory Faerie Queene (Spenser) Fagles, Robert Family Circus Faulkner, William Fierstein, Harvey, Torchsong Trilogy Filología Findley, Timothy; The Butterfly Plague Finkielkraut, Alain, The Imaginary Jew Firbank, Ronald, Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli Fitzgerald, F. Scott Flaubert, Gustave; Dictionary of Clichés; Madame Bovary

Who are we? The answers that we try to give throughout our unfolding lives are never utterly convincing. We are the face in the mirror, the name and nationality given to us, the sex that our cultures steadfastly define, the reflection in the eye of those we look at, the fantasy of the one who loves us and the nightmare of the one who hates us, the incipient body in the cradle and the motionless body in the winding sheet. We are all these things, and also their contrary, our self in the shadows.

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