A Reader on Reading

I do love Alberto Manguel reflections on reading, although I get accused of being too meta when friends and family catch me with his books. It does sound a bit absurd to say, “I’m reading a great book about reading books, called ‘A Reader on Reading’!” This book fits seamlessly in with Manguel’s other works on the topic, indeed several of the essays within this book are included in 'Into the Looking-glass Wood'. Certain passages are also familiar from 'A History of Reading'. These repetitions are not onerous, nonetheless I withhold the fifth star on the basis of not being completely new to me. Not that those essays I’d read before weren’t very much worthy of re-reading.

As with 'Into the Looking-glass Wood', quotations show more from Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-glass are used as a framing device for Manguel’s thoughts. These range over historical, social, cultural, and personal topics, sometimes with a narrow focus on a single author or incident. Each is beautifully crafted and thoughtful. ‘AIDS and the poet’ is especially powerful, ‘How Pinocchio Learned to Read’ especially memorable, and ‘Faking It’ especially funny. Having recently read 'Wicked Company', I was also delighted to learn an interesting snippet about the Enlightenment from ‘Candide in Sanssouci’.

I always emerge from Manguel’s books feeling vindicated in my love of books and delighted by his articulations of the joy and satisfaction of wide reading. I may spend plenty of time on the internet (not least browsing goodreads), but find that reading books opens my mind and generates ideas in a way that surfing the net does not. The two experiences are very different and I would definitely choose a library of books over my laptop, if I had to pick only one. Like me, Manguel does not dismiss the means that technology provide for access to literature and information, he merely defends books as having their own importance. They have not been superceded, merely supplemented. In fact, the internet has been a great boon to my personal search for new books to read. Being able to search library catalogues from home is fantastic! show less

Alberto Manguel's new book of collected essays/lectures/&c., A Reader on Reading (Yale University Press, 2010) is every much a delight as his past collections have been, although I should warn the casual reader that not all of the pieces here are immediately connected to the act of reading (some are devoted more to philosophical discussions, political commentaries, or media criticism, for example).

But the majority of the essays here do touch on topics of biblio-interest. Manguel tackles the difficulties of cataloging in "Meanwhile, in Another Part of the Forest," saying "Subject indexes, literary genres, school compendiums, and thematic anthologies suggest to the reader merely one of a multitude of points of view, none comprehensive, show more none even grazing the breadth and depth of a mysterious piece of writings. Books refuse to sit quietly on shelves: Gulliver's Travels jumps from "Chronicles" to "Social Satire" to "Children's Literature" and will not be faithful to any of these labels (p. 27).

Manguel offers essays on false attributions to Borges and word games, a paean to the "full stop"; a "brief history of the page," in which Borges is credited with predicting the advent of the e-book, and Montaigne's marginalia are discussed (all of his marginalia were in French; he is quoted as saying "no matter what language is spoken by my books, I speak to them in my own"). Short histories of literary editors (a very different profession in North America, Manguel observes, than in the rest of the world) and translators are provided, and Manguel describes the moment when he realized that authors invent their narrators (while reading Treasure Island as a boy), offers up a selection of "Notes Towards the Definition of the Ideal Reader" (probably my favorite essay here). In "Saint Augustine's Computer," Manguel examines how reading processes are likely to change, as "certain genres now available mainly as codices will give way to other formats, better suited for their purpose." He even seems to predict the iPad, or something like it: "a single portable apparatus that will offer all these textual possibilities: displaying text, reciting, allowing for annotations and proposing playful modes of research ..."

As always, Manguel's writing is lovely: in the piece on the "testamentary works" of authors and artists ("a work for which all the rest must be seen as preparations or drafts, a culminating work, a crowning achievement") he concludes "Since we are not immortal, we have to content ourselves with a sampling, and therefore the choice of testamentary works is fully justified. As long as we remember that under the pomp and circumstance there is a rustle and a stirring, a vast, dark, rich forest full of fallen or discarded leaves." The twin essays "Notes Towards a Definition of the Ideal Reader" and "Notes Towards a Definition of the Ideal Library" are bibliophilic gold, and a piece about Manguel's personal library, "The Library at Home" (originally published in the New York Times) remains one of my very favorite Manguel essays.

Another good addition to the Manguel canon.

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Pinokyo'nun okumayı öğrendikten sonra bütün yapabileceği, ders kitabı laflarını papağan gibi tekrarlamaktır. Sayfadaki kelimeleri özümser ama hazmetmez: Kitaplar hakiki anlamda onun olmaz, çünkü hâlâ, maceralarının sonunda bile, onları kendine ve dünyaya ilişkin tecrübelerine uygulamaktan acizdir.

Deneyimin kitapları, kitapların kişisel deneyimi zenginleştirdiği ve dönüştürdüğü yaratıcı bir okuma nasıl olur? Okumalar Okuması tam da bu sorunun yanıtı. Che Guevara'dan Borges'e birçok tanıdık yüz, İlyada'dan Alice Harikalar Diyarında'ya kadar birçok kitap Manguel'in okumalarında, içten ve kışkırtıcı yorumlarında yeniden hayat buluyor.

Another excellent and thought provoking series of essays on reading and books. Although it contains many essays that appear to be based on ones that have appeared in his other recent books (I have not checked to see whether they are identical), this collection develops a beautiful argument for the civilising effect of books and why there will continue to be a need for the physical book.
However, I read his collections as much for the language as for the content and always enjoy his asides and the illustrations of his breadth of reading; far more than I will have time for in my lifetime. So I also read him as a useful guide to works that I should search out.
Recommended.

Alberto Manguel is the epitome of the erudite idealistic booklover. He ushers us into his library of ideas, knowing that his and our enjoyment of books, the reading, the collecting, the savouring, will be mutually enhanced by the sharing of ideas. He is one of those rare authors who make you feel that he is putting into words your own unformed thoughts. ”Because I loved books (which I collected with miserly passion) I felt the guilty shame of someone in love with a freak.” You recognise them on the page as your own, and are grateful for his immense skills of articulating what you didn’t know you thought, until you read them. And then he tells us so much more, he is showing us worlds, and he is our knowledgeable guide.

He doesn’t show more restrict his essays to books and libraries. They are about reading, about words, or Words, and their power. So his subjects are wide-ranging. He decries the falsity and hypocrisy of wordsmiths such as Maria Varga Llosa and his essays on Argentina’s dirty war. He chafes at the North American use of the editor in publishing. ”Before going out into the world, every writer of fiction in North America (and most of the British Commonwealth) acquires, as it were, a literary back-seat driver.” He thinks that this is because of the “mercantile fabric of American society. Because books must be saleable merchandise, experts must be employed to ensure that the products are profitably commercial. At its worst this unifying task produces mass-market romances; at its best it cuts Thomas Wolfe down to size.” As always, he has quotations to fit every need. When Graham Greene was asked to change the title of his novel Travels with My Aunt, his eight word telegram said, “Easier to change publisher than to change title.”
Delightful. show less

Alberto Manguel is the epitome of the erudite idealistic booklover. He ushers us into his library of ideas, knowing that his and our enjoyment of books, the reading, the collecting, the savouring, will be mutually enhanced by the sharing of ideas. He is one of those rare authors who make you feel that he is putting into words your own unformed thoughts. ”Because I loved books (which I collected with miserly passion) I felt the guilty shame of someone in love with a freak.” You recognise them on the page as your own, and are grateful for his immense skills of articulating what you didn’t know you thought, until you read them. And then he tells us so much more, he is showing us worlds, and he is our knowledgeable guide.

He doesn’t show more restrict his essays to books and libraries. They are about reading, about words, or Words, and their power. So his subjects are wide-ranging. He decries the falsity and hypocrisy of wordsmiths such as Maria Varga Llosa and his essays on Argentina’s dirty war. He chafes at the North American use of the editor in publishing. ”Before going out into the world, every writer of fiction in North America (and most of the British Commonwealth) acquires, as it were, a literary back-seat driver.” He thinks that this is because of the “mercantile fabric of American society. Because books must be saleable merchandise, experts must be employed to ensure that the products are profitably commercial. At its worst this unifying task produces mass-market romances; at its best it cuts Thomas Wolfe down to size.” As always, he has quotations to fit every need. When Graham Greene was asked to change the title of his novel Travels with My Aunt, his eight word telegram said, “Easier to change publisher than to change title.”
Delightful. show less

Alberto Manguel's "A Reader on Reading" was not quite what I expecting. I thought that it would be a collection of essays and reviews about various books and/or authors, with his usual interesting comments. Instead, this collection of essays covers a variety of topics-politics, current events, history, religion, mythology, e-books, and more. The essays do have some connection to books or literature, in some way. These essays were written from the late 1990s through 2010, when the book was published.
You learn that Manguel loves Lewis Carroll's Alice books (every section and chapter has a quote and illustration from one of the Alice books), he believes Homer was not a real person but created as necessity to fill in a gap (which saddens show more me), that during an emergency surgery that required a 10-day hospital stay his only book of choice was Don Quixote (which I still have not read, but certainly plan to), and that he hates "American Psycho" by Bret Ellis, preferring to throw it out rather than giving it away to someone (no plans to read that book!).
This is not a book to sit down and read cover-to-cover, plan to read the essays at different sittings and different times, a chapter here, a chapter there. I even re-read some of the chapters after I had already read the whole book because they should be savored, listened and paid attention to, and enjoyed.
Some of my favorite chapters include "The Blind Bookkeeper" (mostly about Homer), "The Secret Sharer", not about Joseph Conrad but about book editors (did you know that editors exist only in North America and the British Commonwealth? It is changing in some places, but in most of the rest of the world they have proof-readers to correct errors only, not to cut and change for commercial reasons), "Reading White for Black" (about translators), "Art and Blasphemy" (religion and books), "End of Reading", and, especially, "Perseverance of Truth" which is about truth in literature and what happens to those who tell it (look out Socrates). Sadly, the world is getting far worse since this was written, here in the United States, and elsewhere.
When reading (and re-reading) the essays, I suggest noting down chapters you like, pages that seem significant, underline phrases that inspire, anger, or interest you, and like Manguel, write in the margins! The essays will inspire you to read other books as well, as I have already re-read the Alice books after I finished it... show less