A Reader on Reading

“A meditation on the ‘art of reading’ . . . [and] a celebration of ‘the reader’s whims—trust in pleasure and faith in haphazardness.’” —The New Yorker

Here are thirty-nine reflections on the joy and solace of reading by the internationally celebrated author Alberto Manguel, who is widely considered one of the world’s great readers. Narratives of Jonah, Homer, and Dante; topics ranging from Pinocchio to comics, from Borges to Che Guevara; and especially Lewis Carroll’s Alice books animate this extraordinary literary journey. Whether he is writing about censorship or intellectual curiosity, the art of translation or the history of the page, the ideal reader or those numinous memory palaces we call libraries, Manguel shows how words lend coherence to the world and offer us “a few safe places, as real as paper and as bracing as ink, to grant us roof and board in our passage through the dark and nameless wood.”

“Essays of this quality are worth reading, or rereading, wherever they are encountered.” —John Gross, The New York Review of Books

“‘There are,’ writes Manguel, ‘certain books that, in themselves, are an ideal library.’ This book might be one of them.” —Ángel Gurría-Quintana, Financial Times

“Many famous authors have extolled the pleasures of the printed page, of course, but to my mind none in recent years has done it so expertly or eloquently as Alberto Manguel. Happily, a collection of his best literary meditations is now on offer, A Reader on Reading, and it is a must for book lovers.” —John Sledge, Mobile Press-Register