A Reading Diary: A Passionate Reader's Reflections on a Year of Books - Hardcover

Manguel, Alberto

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374247420 ISBN 13: 9780374247423

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004

Synopsis

While traveling in Calgary, Alberto Manguel was struck by how the novel he was reading (Goethe's Elective Affinities) seemed to reflect the social chaos of the world he was living in. An article in the daily paper would be suddenly illuminated by a passage in the novel; a long reflection would be prompted by a single word. He decided to keep a record of these moments, rereading a book a month, and forming A Reading Diary: a volume of notes, reflections, impressions of travel, of friends, of events public and private, all ellicited by his reading.

From Don Quixote (August) to The Island of Dr. Moreau (February) to Kim (April), Manguel leads us on an enthralling adventure in literature and life, and demonstrates how, for the passionate reader, one is utterly inextricable from the other.

About this title

About the Author

Alberto Manguel was born in Buenos Aires and has lived in Italy, England, Tahiti, Canada, and France. He is the prize-winning author of Reading Pictures, A History of Reading, and The Dictionary of Imaginary Places, among other works.

Reviews

Writer and critic Manguel's (Reading Pictures) elegantly elliptical and wryly contemporary diary of cities revisited and books reread during 2002 and 2003 opens with a journey he undertakes to his birthplace, Buenos Aires, just after Argentina's economic crisis in December 2001. As Manguel's reading overlaps with jotted observations of Buenos Aires, he reflects on the meaning of homeland, and on memory. Nostalgia and the significance of cities—in personal and literary terms—are themes that preoccupy Manguel on further trips to London, Paris, Germany and Canada. Yet Manguel is less melancholic than thoughtful and joyfully postmodern. At home in rural France, his reflections range as widely as on his travels, emerging as he tidies his library, converses with writers Mavis Gallant and Rohinton Mistry, and receives visits from his adult children. His eclectic reading matter includes H.G. Wells, Conan Doyle, Margaret Atwood, Kipling and Goethe. And he quotes from many more writers: Chateaubriand, Virginia Woolf and Chesterton, to name but a few. Manguel delights in list making—whether of favorite detective novels, mad scientists or literary heroes. Manguel's exquisitely distilled style and gentle humility are pure pleasure. His diary is a gold mine of the unexpected, and his companionable, deeply cultivated persona will entrance all those who love to read and to ponder.
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An exceptionally responsive reader, a discerning and cosmopolitan literary scholar, and the author of the much cherished A History of Reading (1996), Manguel writes about books with an enlivening mix of autobiography and criticism that now finds felicitous form in a two-year diary chronicling his rereading of a set of beloved books. This is a time-honored tradition, but Manguel's approach is unique in his selections, his perceptions, and his savoir faire. An Argentine who became a Canadian citizen and who has traveled and lived all around the world, Manguel counts among his favorites Sherlock Holmes and Don Quixote, Kipling and Goethe, H. G. Wells and Margaret Atwood, Memoirs from Beyond the Grave and The Wind in the Willows. Manguel muses on the resonance and relevance of these works and many others, while simultaneously recounting his journeys to such places as Buenos Aires, Newfoundland, and Sweden, and sharing the quiet pleasure of setting up his extensive library in his new (yet very old) home in France. (See p.214 for a review of Manguel's literary mystery.) Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Excerpt from A Reading Diary by Alberto Manguel. Copyright © 2004 by Alberto Manguel. Published in October, 2004 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, LLC. All rights reserved.


FOREWORD

. . . that we must laboriously seek the meaning of each word and
line, conjecturing a larger sense than common use permits out of
what wisdom and valour and generosity we have.
—Thoreau, Walden

Like every person of good taste, Menard abominated such worthless
pantomimes, only apt—he would say—to provoke the plebeian pleasure
of anachronism or (what is worse) to enthrall us with the rudimentary
notion that all ages are the same or that they are different.
—Jorge Luis Borges, Ficciones

There are books that we skim over happily, forgetting one page as we turn to the next; others that we read reverently, without daring to agree or disagree; others that offer mere information and preclude our commentary; others still that, because we have loved them so long and so dearly, we can repeat word by word, since we know them, in the truest sense, by heart.

Reading is a conversation. Lunatics engage in imaginary dialogues that they hear echoing somewhere in their minds; readers engage in a similar dialogue provoked silently by the words on a page. Usually the reader's response is not recorded, but often a reader will feel the need to take up a pencil and answer in the margins of a text. This comment, this gloss, this shadow that sometimes accompanies our favorite books, extends and transports the text into another time and another experience; it lends reality to the illusion that a book speaks to us and wills us (its readers) into being.

A couple of years ago, after my fifty-third birthday, I decided to reread a few of my favorite old books, and I was struck, once again, by how their many-layered and complex worlds of the past seemed to reflect the dismal chaos of the world I was living in. A passage in a novel would suddenly illuminate an article in the daily paper; a half-forgotten episode would be recalled by a certain scene; a single word would prompt a long reflection. I decided to keep a record of these moments.

It occurred to me then that, rereading a book a month, I might complete, in a year, something between a personal diary and a commonplace book: a volume of notes, reflections, impressions of travel, sketches of friends, of events public and private, all elicited by my reading. I made a list of what the chosen books would be. It seemed important, for balance, that there be a little of everything. (Since I'm nothing if not an eclectic reader, this wasn't too difficult to accomplish.)

Reading is a comfortable, solitary, slow and sensuous task. Writing used to share some of these qualities. However, in recent times the profession of write has acquired something of the ancient professions of traveling salesman and repertory actor. Writers are called upon to perform one-night stands in faraway places, extolling the virtues of their own books instead of toilet brushes or encyclopedia sets. Mainly because of these duties, throughout my reading year I found myself traveling to many different cities and yet wishing to be back home, in my house in a small village in France, where I keep my books and do my work.

Scientists, have imagined that, before the universe came into being, it existed in a state of potentiality, time and space held in abeyance—"in a fog of possibility," as one commentator put it—until the Big Bang. This latent existence should surprise no reader, for whom every book exists in a dreamlike condition until the hands that open it and the eyes that peruse it stir the words into awareness. The following pages are my attempt to record a few such awakenings.

Edition details

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0374247420
• ISBN 13: 9780374247423
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 224