A Reader on Reading
Alberto Manguel
A Reader
on Reading
Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS
New Haven and London
Published with assistance from the Mary Cady Tew
Memorial Fund.
Copyright © 2010 Alberto Manguel.
All rights reserved.
This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part,
including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying
permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright
Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without
written permission from the publishers.
Designed by Sonia Shannon
Set in Fournier type by Tseng Information Systems, Inc.
Printed in the United States of America.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Manguel, Alberto.
A reader on reading / Alberto Manguel.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-300-15982-0 (alk. paper)
1. Books and reading. 2. Manguel, Alberto—
Books and reading. I. Title.
z1003.M2925 2010
028’.9—dc22
2009043719
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British
Library.
This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO z39.48-
1992 (Permanence of Paper).
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
“Give your evidence,” said the King; “and don’t be nervous, or I’ll have you executed on the spot.”
I. WHO AM I?
A Reader in the Looking-Glass Wood
Room for the Shadow
On Being Jewish
Meanwhile, in Another Part of the Forest
The Further off from England
Homage to Proteus
II. THE LESSON OF THE MASTER
Borges in Love
Borges and the Longed-For Jew
Faking It
III. MEMORANDA
The Death of Che Guevara
The Blind Bookkeeper
The Perseverance of Truth
AIDS and the Poet
IV. WORDPLAY
The Full Stop
In Praise of Words
A Brief History of the Page
The Voice That Says “I”
Final Answers
What Song the Sirens Sang
V. THE IDEAL READER
Notes Towards a Definition of the Ideal Reader
How Pinocchio Learned to Read
Candide in Sanssouci
The Gates of Paradise
Time and the Doleful Knight
Saint Augustine’s Computer
VI. BOOKS AS BUSINESS
Reading White for Black
The Secret Sharer
Honoring Enoch Soames
Jonah and the Whale
The Legend of the Dodos
VII. CRIME AND PUNISHMENT
In Memoriam
God’s Spies
Once Again, Troy
Art and Blasphemy
At the Mad Hatter’s Table
VIII. THE NUMINOUS LIBRARY
Notes Towards a Definition of the Ideal Library
The Library of the Wandering Jew
The Library as Home
The End of Reading
“You ought to return thanks in a neat speech,” the Red Queen said,
frowning at Alice as she spoke.
THE SUBJECT OF THIS BOOK, as of almost all my other books, is reading, that most human of creative activities. I believe that we are, at the core, reading animals and that the art of reading, in its broadest sense, defines our species. We come into the world intent on finding narrative in everything: in the landscape, in the skies, in the faces of others, and, of course, in the images and words that our species creates. We read our own lives and those of others, we read the societies we live in and those that lie beyond our borders, we read pictures and buildings, we read that which lies between the covers of a book.
This last is of the essence. For me, words on a page give the world coherence. When the inhabitants of Macondo were afflicted with an amnesia-like sickness which came to them one day during their hundred years of solitude, they realized that their knowledge of the world was quickly disappearing and that they might forget what a cow was, what a tree was, what a house was. The antidote, they discovered, lay in words. To remember what their world meant to them, they wrote out labels and hung them from beasts and objects: “This is a tree,” “This is a house,” “This is a cow, and from it you get milk, which mixed with coffee gives you café con leche.” Words tell us what we, as a society, believe the world to be.
“Believe to be”: therein lies the challenge. Pairing words with experience and experience with words, we, readers, sift through stories that echo or prepare us for an experience, or tell us of experiences that will never be ours, as we know all too well, except on the burning page. Accordingly, what we believe a book to be reshapes itself with every reading. Over the years, my experience, my tastes, my prejudices have changed: as the days go by, my memory keeps reshelving, cataloguing, discarding the volumes in my library; my words and my world — except for a few constant landmarks — are never one and the same. Heraclitus’s bon mot about time applies equally well to my reading: “You never dip into the same book twice.”
