Matías Gabriel Battistón 2008-01-12

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Book titles can be misleading because they work under the assumption that hundreds of pages can be summed up in a handful of words. That is why many titles try not so much to be precise as to be approximate, and not so much to be approximate as to be memorable. Alberto Manguel's A History of Reading is a good example. While it is, in a way, a history, it is equally a collection of essays, an anthology of fragments, a portrait of its author, an anti-history, and an amusing miscellany of erudition. At heart, more than anything else, this is an ode to books.

A History of Reading is divided in 22 chapters, which in turn are grouped in 4 parts (the fact that the books opens with the one titled "The Last Page" is a sign of things to come.) Manguel covers reading from its beginnings in 6000 BC, up to the 20th Century; from clay tablets to computer screens. Each chapter deals with a particular topic, which Manguel uses as a springboard to plunge into a myriad of texts and authors, sharing his opinions and experiences with the reader, whom he gently guides along. In his own pleasantly rambling way he shows reading as seen by scientists, by philosophers, by teachers, by students, by parents, by theologians, by translators, by writers, by emperors, by librarians, by the blind, by the oppressed, by the oppressors, by oracles, by cuban cigar manufacturers, and by just about everybody in between.

Manguel is far-reaching but concise, and he usually prefers to address the general by tackling the particular. For example, censorship is embodied by his portrait of ruthless censor Anthony Comstock, and the evolution of reading from a social to a more private activity is nutshelled in the story of Saint Augustine, who was puzzled at the sight of Saint Ambrose reading, unlike everybody else at the time, silently. Manguel does hint at the larger picture, but he mostly lets his examples speak for him. Walt Whitman, Callimachus, glasses, Kafka, Shi Huang-ti, an old drawing on a 5th Century edition of Aristotle's De Anima, a page form the Codex Seraphinianus... These are all used as symbols, as tips of icebergs waiting to be discovered.

So, if most non-fiction writers prefer to make remarks and illustrate them with a few examples, Manguel, on the other hand, provides a plethora of examples and uses remarks sparingly to illustrate and stitch them together. Like a ransom note made with letters cut out from different newspapers, A History of Reading takes anecdotes, facts and quotations gleaned from countless sources and turns them into something that still manages to feel wholly personal. Walter Benjamin once envisaged a book written only with quotations; Manguel has not written that book, but he has captured its spirit.

Some will find this unconventional approach to writing very familiar. At the beginning of the book, we see how a teenage Manguel, then working in a library in Argentina, meets an already blind Jorge Luis Borges, to whom he is asked to read in a regular basis. Every time Borges would pick an author, listen carefully, and proceed to add his spoken footnotes to the text. I point this out not just because this is one of the most interesting moments in the book, but because it seems Borges's ideas, style, and way of looking at literature have shaped Manguel's own, starting with his disregard for strict chronology ("an arbitrary convention") up to his penchant for text-linking acrobatics. Even the title recalls Borges's unconventional "histories": "A History of Eternity", "A Universal History of Iniquity", "A General History of Labyrinths"...

Manguel himself sums up his own style beautifully in the last - and most Borgesian - chapter: a commentary on an imaginary book called The History of Reading. Here, in a playfully detached tone, he observes that "...the history of this book has been particularly difficult to grasp; it is made, so to speak, of its digressions. One subject calls to another, an anecdote brings a seemingly unrelated story to mind, and the author proceeds as if unaware of logical causality or historical continuity, as if defining the reader's freedom in the very writing about the craft."

A History of Reading is certainly not perfect. While its best chapters are deeply captivating ("The Missing First Page", "Reading the Future", "The Book Fool"), scattered along the way are stretches of workmanlike prose; sometimes the mixtures don't spark nor the conclusions satisfy; and whenever Manguel doesn't take off, he plods. But then again, this is a book that actually invites you to skip whole pages, to dip in and out, to underline thoroughly, to re-think and re-organize at will. It is a work whose minor defects prod you into participating; it is, in short, a reader's delight.

Ian Muldoon 2005-12-24

11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

When Nelson Mandela was released after 27 years in a white man's prison for being black he acknowledged that books kept him sane. When Somerset Maugham went travelling through Malaya early last century his companions were books. Any reader can identify with these two quite different gentlemen - Virginia Woolf wrote whilst at school "I have sometimes dreamt that when the day of judgement dawns and the great conquerors and lawyers and statesmen come to receive their rewards - their crowns, their laurels, their names carved indelibly upon imperishable marble - the Almighty will turn to Peter and will say, not without a certain envy when He sees us coming with our books under our arms, " Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them. They have loved reading." p. 311/312 A HISTORY OF READING. The great truth that every reader knows is that books liberate one, enrich one, reveal, embolden and humanize, entertain, inform, and nourish.
Senor Manguel's excellent book does all of these things in part - I never knew that the King James Version of the Bible was composed by a committee of 49. It was enlightening too to see the author list the common fallacies held about readers: 1. all literature is political, in the sense that it influences the political consciousness of the reader (a fallacy endorsed enthusiastically by Totalitarian States)2. The influence of a text is is directly proportional to its circulation. ( Mssrs Mills and Boon presently rule the Western World non? Or is it Mr Dan Brown President?). 3. "Popular" culture has a much larger following than "high" culture and therefore it accurately reflects the attitudes of the masses; 4. "high" culture tends to reinforce acceptance of the existing social and political order (a presumption widely shared by both the left and the right), and, 5. the canon of "great books" is defined solely by social elites. Common readers eitherr do not recognise that canon, or else they accept it only out of deference to elite opinion. p. 313 HISTORY OF READING.
Other gems among the many include this from KAFKA " Altogether I think we ought to read only books that bite and sting us. If the book we are reading doesn't shake us awake like a blow on the skull, why bother reading it in the first place? So that it can make us happy, as you put it? Good God, we'd be just as happy if we had no books at all; books that make us happy, we could, in a pinch, also write ourselves. What we need are books that hit us like a painful misfortune, like the death of someone we loved more than we love ourselves, that make us feel as though we had been banished to the woods, far from any human presence, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. This is what I believe. " p93 (Brilliant eh?)
There is also a touching examination of the prejudicial punishments readers have suffered because they read - beaten, shunned, imprisoned, and labelled - NERD, INTELLECTUAL, POSEUR, PRETENTIOUS TWIT, COMMUNIST etc.
Beautifully and joyfully composed, I finished Senor Manguel's fine A HISTORY OF READING on 24Dec05 and immediately started TRISTRAM SHANDY and made notes of other books mentioned that piqued my taste, nay love, of the continuing journey - a journey I shall never complete as, for example, I refuse to FINISH Proust - who would want it to end?

Betty Burks 2005-11-24

2 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

When I chose this 'history' at a book sale, I was told it's a textbook. It does give several theories about how we are able to read, but we are not told what to read. We are what we read. "You should make it a habit, when reading books, to attend more to the sense than to the words, to concentrate on the fruit rather than the foliage" was the advice from the 13th Century as it should be today as well.

Writing requires a reader. Many authors have public appearances to read from their works. It was thought that listening to a text led the audience to buy the published piece. "Reading publicly was the best way for an author to acquire an audience. In fact, reading publicly was in itself a rudimentary form of publishing." Before I left Pulaski, our local celebrity/writer, Gregory Mcdonald read his poem for a group of us there for him to sign the books of his we already owned. We had no idea he had written a poem, of all things! He wrote in my A WORLD TOO WIDE "To an exciting future..." In the movie, "Capote," we watched as Truman received a standing ovation when he read from a work in progress. Here in Knoxville, several local writers read from their new books; I've heard only one and disappointed that he had not acquired public-speaking skills and did not read as good as he wrote.

There is a photo in this 'textbook' of Charles Dickens giving a reading. Back then, there were illustrated novels, like his A CHRISTMAS CAROL. Now, this type of using drawings or pictures throughout a book has revived, starting with Jack Finney's back-in-time stories. The first published books were world classics like "Everyman," Goethe's "Faust," and Ibsen's plays.

Oscar Wilde is reported to have remarked, "I never read a book I must review...." It has been proven that singing and reading to can slow down the destruction of the brain cells which causes Alzheimer's disease; "if you can't think of what to do, sit and read to your loved one -- if you read poetry, it's almost like singing."

There have been censorship on certain books since time immemorial; Nazis used it at a public book burning of some American books. I remember when Salman Rushdie's THE SATANIC VERSES was burned and he had a death threat on his head by Islamic fundamentalists. "The parents who took the Hawkins County Public Schools to court in Tennessee in 1980... argued that an entire elementary school series, which included "Cinderella," "Goldilocks" and THE WIZARD OF OZ, violated their fundamentalist religious beliefs."

This book is the history not only of reading but also of common readers, the individuals who, through the ages, chose certain books over others...at times rescued forgotten titles from the past...." This is the story of their small triumphs...and of the manner in which these things came to pass. How it all happened is minutely chronicled in this book." Writers read mainly from their own works to entice the listener to desire to possess and read all of the book. There are book collectors who never read the books they obtain. Many live in this town where the local history writer decided against another edition of his first book (his best!) and patrons at some of the libraries are taking the few available without checking them out. Don't they know it's a sin to steal a book someone else might enjoy as much as they? They must want it more than I, to go to such drastic measures. Even the libraries cannpt replace it. They should place the last remaining well-worn copies in the Reference Department so that history of the early happenings in this town will not be lost to oblivion; they could have it rebound into a hardback so it would last. Some books don't need to disappear from the shelves. Some books are worth saving.

Literary Seeker 2005-10-08

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"A History of Reading" was actually assigned as the textbook for one of my college classes, and as such it's pretty interesting. Manguel does a lot of in-depth and unique research concerning all (or at least most, I'm not finished w/ it yet) aspects of reading from how reading came about to how books were formed to what it means to read. Had I run across this item on my own, I'd still think it quite interesting.

E. L. Weinhold 2005-08-17

4 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

Alberto Manguel spent a good deal of time "crossing his t's and dotting his i's" in this book. The research is solid, and serves well as a spring board into the deeper book history and history of scholarship. The chapters are stand-alone vignettes, not necessarily following a choronological model throughout the book.

Manguel also ventures into auxiliary areas of interest, like the history of eyeglasses, and history of printing. _The History of Reading_ was a real joy to read.