A Reader on ReadingIn 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. |
Contents
THE LESSoN oF THE MASTER | 45 |
MEMoRANDA | 77 |
THE IDEAL READER | 149 |
BooKS AS BUSINESS | 199 |
CRIME AND PUNISHMENT | 229 |
THE NUMINoUS LIBRARy | 265 |
Sources | 293 |
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able Adolfo Bioy Casares Adventures in Wonderland Aleph Alice Alice’s Alice's Adventures allowed answer Argentina Argentinean artists asked Augustine Beatrice become believe Bioy blind Borges Borges's Buenos Aires calle Arcos Canto century Cervantes Chapter condemned Dante death Don Quixote dream editor English erotic essays everything existence experience eyes fact felt fiction Friedrich G. K. Chesterton garden gay literature Guaraní Homer homosexual Hrant Dink human ideal library ideal reader identity imagined invention Jewish Jonah Jorge Luis Borges language later literary living Looking-Glass meaning memory Menard mysterious never night Nineveh notion novel odysseus once one’s perhaps Pierre Menard Pinocchio poem poet political published question Sanssouci scroll sense sexual Sirens society someone song space Spanish story tell things thought told torture translation truth voice wanted words writing written wrote