A Reader on Reading - Hardcover

Manguel, Alberto

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 030015982X ISBN 13: 9780300159820

Publisher: Yale University Press, 2010

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author:

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.

Review:

"Books jump out of their jackets when Manguel opens them and dance in delight as they make contact with his ingenious, voluminous brain."—Peter Conrad, The Observer (Peter Conrad The Observer)

“In this excellent collection of essays. . . Manguel reminds us of the community we join every time we open a book, be it something new or a treasured volume from our youth.”--Publishers Weekly
(Publishers Weekly 2010-02-01)

"If there are such things as a musician’s musician and a writer’s writer, one could argue that Manguel (The Library at Night) is a reader’s reader.”--Library Journal 

 

(Library Journal 2010-03-01)

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

“For those of us who are serious about books and literature, reading amounts to an almost sacred act. 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

(John Sledge Mobile Press-Register 2010-03-28)

“The range of A Reader on Reading is in itself as intriguing as that of a good library. . . . A book full of good things.”--Michael Dirda, Barnes & Noble Review
 
(Michael Dirda Barnes & Noble Review 2010-05-07)

 “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



(The New Yorker)

About this edition

• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 030015982X
• ISBN 13: 9780300159820
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 320