A Reader on Reading

by Alberto Manguel

• ISBN13: 9780300172089
• ISBN10: 0300172087
• Format: Trade Paper
• Copyright: 2011-06-28
• Publisher: Yale University Press

Summary

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 ofA 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.

Author Biography

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.

Table of Contents

Preface	p. ix
Who Am I?
A Reader in the Looking-Glass Wood	p. 3
Room for the Shadow	p. 11
On Being Jewish	p. 22
Meanwhile, in Another Part of the Forest	p. 26
The Further off from England	p. 37
Homage to Proteus	p. 42
The Lesson Of The Master
Borges in Love	p. 47
Borges and the Longed-For Jew	p. 62
Faking It	p. 66
Memoranda
The Death of Che Guevara	p. 79
The Blind Bookkeeper	p. 86
The Perseverance of Truth	p. 95
AIDS and the Poet	p. 104
Wordplay
The Full Stop	p. 115
In Praise of Words	p. 117
A Brief History of the Page	p. 120
The Voice That Says "I"	p. 128
Final Answers	p. 137
What Song the Sirens Sang	p. 141
The Ideal Reader
NotesTowards a Definition of the Ideal Reader	p. 151
How Pinocchio Learned to Read	p. 155
Candide in Sanssouci	p. 164
The Gates of Paradise	p. 172
Time and the Doleful Knight	p. 182
Saint Augustine's Computer	p. 187
Books As Business
Reading White for Black	p. 201
The Secret Sharer	p. 207
Honoring Enoch Soames	p. 214
Jonah and the Whale	p. 218
The Legend of the Dodos	p. 227
Crime And Punishment
In Memoriam	p. 231
God's Spies	p. 237
Once Again, Troy	p. 248
Art and Blasphemy	p. 251
At the Mad Hatter's Table	p. 254
The Numinous Library
Notes Towards a Definition of the Ideal Library	p. 267
The Library of the Wandering Jew	p. 270
The Library as Home	p. 278
The End of Reading	p. 282
Sources	p. 293
Index	p. 297
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