My Reading Journey with A Reader on Reading by Alberto Manguel

Image Credit:  The Graphics Fairy

All I can say is thank goodness for Goodreads.  I have found so many wonderful books with the assistance of my Goodreads friends-all of whom, I have never met face-to-face.  My TBR-To Be Read-list is up to the ridiculously humongous 1,875.  Actually, this really does not bother me.  I often use my TBR shelf on Goodreads as a way to catalog books.  I recently added a number of books by an Argentinean author, Alberto Manguel, and I have to give credit to my discovery of each of these treasures to one of my book groups on the Goodreads site, The Book Addicts.  The group recently decided on their nonfiction selection for the fall, and one of the choices was by an author I was not familiar with, Alberto Manguel, entitled A History of Reading, so I immediately looked him up on Goodreads and fell head-over-heels in love with the descriptions of his books.  

Alas, The Book Addicts did not end up picking his book for their fall read, but that didn't stop me.  In fact, the book I chose to read first by this respected Argentinean writer is not A History of Reading.  However, it is one of the two that I immediately went out and purchased, and I just this weekend, started reading my first Alberto Manguel selection.  I have to say I'm in love with this book, and decided to share my reading journey of Manguel's A Reader on Reading on The Things You Can Read.  John Gross stated in his review of this book in the New York Review of Books, "Essays of this quality are worth reading, or rereading, wherever they are encountered."  Mr. Gross is oh so right.  Ian Sonsom, a book reviewer for The Guardian, stated the following about Alberto Manguel in his review: 

It is very rare indeed for someone to have devoted their lifetime to making these complex and delightful reconstructions, to sharing and reporting on their experiences as a reader; much rarer, say, than the many who devote themselves simply to criticism, to judgment or to commentary. It's so rare, in fact, that it's difficult to know what to call it. 

Please come join me on my reading journey of A Reader on Reading by Alberto Manguel.  I will be posting over the next few weeks my thoughts and insights on this book.

Excerpt from Goodreads:

About this author

Alberto Manguel (born 1948 in Buenos Aires) is an Argentine-born writer, translator, and editor. He is the author of numerous non-fiction books such as The Dictionary of Imaginary Places (co-written with Gianni Guadalupi in 1980) and A History of Reading (1996) The Library at Night (2007) and Homer's Iliad and Odyssey: A Biography (2008), and novels such as News From a Foreign Country Came (1991).  

Manguel believes in the central importance of the book in societies of the written word where, in recent times, the intellectual act has lost most of its prestige. Libraries (the reservoirs of collective memory) should be our essential symbol, not banks. Humans can be defined as reading animals, come into the world to decipher it and themselves.

Listen to an interview of Alberto Manguel where he talks about A Reader on Reading.

Conversation: Alberto Manguel and view his lecture at Yale University's Whitney Humanities Center entitled Alberto Manguel - Borges and the Impossibility of Writing

Visit Alberto Manguel's site:  Alberto Manguel

Happy Reading!
Things You Can Read

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