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| A Reading Diary | 
 enlarge | Author: Alberto Manguel
Publisher: Vintage Canada
Category: Book
This item is no longer available
Avg. Customer Rating:  6 reviews
Sales Rank: 861548
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 272
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 6.9 x 5.1 x 0.6
ISBN: 0676975917
EAN: 9780676975918
ASIN: 0676975917
Publication Date: September 20, 2005
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Product Description
The must-have literary book of the season! Over the course of a year, the bestselling author of A History of Reading spends a month with each of his 12 favourite books, allowing us to observe both the heart of the reading experience and how life around us can be illuminated by what we read.
From June 2002 to may 2003, Alberto Manguel set out to reread twelve of the books he likes best, and to share with us, his “gentle readers,” his impressions and experiences in doing so. We travel with him as he leaves Canada to set up house in a medieval presbytery in France, visits his childhood home in Argentina and embarks on trips to various other places, always carrying a book in his hand.
The result is an immensely enjoyable collection for every lover of reading — something between an intimate diary, a collection of literary thoughts, and the best travel memoir. A Reading Diary ranges from reflections on much-loved writers — Margaret Atwood, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, H. G. Wells, Cervantes — to seductive introductions to others about whom you will want to know more, such as Sei Shonagon and Adolfo Bioy Casares, simultaneously providing insights into the world of today, its changing seasons and pleasures, its shifting politics and wars — all illuminated by the great novel he is reading at the time.
A Reading Diary is a walk through a year’s worth of best beloved books in the company of an eclectically learned friend. Touching on themes of home and wandering, memory and loss, Alberto Manguel perfectly traces the threads between our reading and our lived experience.
Excerpt from A Reading Diary:
June
Saturday
We have been in our house in France for just over a year, and already I have to leave, to visit my family in Buenos Aires. I don’t want to go. I want to enjoy the village in summer, the garden, the house kept cool by the thick ancient walls. I want to start setting up the books on the shelves we have just had built. I want to sit in my room and work.
On the plane, I pull out a copy of Adolfo Bioy Casares’s The Invention of Morel, the tale of a man stranded on an island that is apparently inhabited by ghosts, a book I read for the first time thirty, thirty-five years ago. . . .
From the Hardcover edition.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 1 more reviews...
 `I like the idea of conversation being a window into one's heart or mind.' May 24, 2008
While travelling in Canada, Alberto Manguel was struck by how the particular novel he was reading (Goethe's `Elective Affinities') seemed to reflect the social chaos of the world in which he was living. An article in a daily paper: a chance observation would suddenly be illuminated by a particular passage in the novel.
He decided to keep a record of such moments by rereading a novel each month and formed a volume of notes, of impressions and observations all elicited in some way by his reading.
This record has formed `A Reading Diary', and I think that many a reflective reader will enjoy it as much as I have. It matters not that I've not read many of the books referred to. I identify completely with the process of serendipity between the worlds we inhabit through reading and those we live in.
`We read what we want to read, not what the author wrote.'
This book is a delight: not just for what it contains but for the possibilities it unlocks.
This is the first of Alberto Manguel's books that I have read, and it most certainly won't be the last.
`This morning, I looked at the books on my shelves and thought that they had no knowledge of my existence. They come to life because I open them and turn their pages, and yet they don't know that I am their reader.'
Jennifer Cameron-Smith
a reading of "the reading diary" March 18, 2006
1 out of 3 found this review helpful
Alberto Manguel hits the nail on the head as he shows the relationship between the reader and the books read. At the deeper level of a serious reader it should become a conversation, as it does with Manguel.
A wonderfully well-read book January 15, 2006
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
Unlike other `Reading Year' books, this one is concerned with revisiting old literary friends. Manguel chooses a single book a month and, in diary form, relates it to his current activities and life parallels. He selects his titles in advance, an eclectic mix from all over the world.
This short book oozes with erudition, and Manguel liberally sprinkles excellent quotes, observations, lists, and anecdotes throughout the text, all the while contemplating the larger questions of home, justice, nostalgia, memory, and war, among others. This meandering but thoughtful recording of a year of the author's life is extremely well-done.
 Books As They Affect Daily Life. November 24, 2005
5 out of 7 found this review helpful
This is not a novel idea, as even I have kept a list of the books read each year for many years; by intention was to keep from re-reading the same things. This is "a volume of notes, refelctions, impressions of travel, of friends and events..." as he re-reads his favorite books. With all his traveling, you'd think he would be busy taking notes for his next book, but a diary is just what he kept, as his travels and life revolved around what he was reading.
It's a good to keep records, and that is the value of a diary of any kind. In my book lists, I would add the date I finished the book. At the time, who had a reason to write a short critique; I know someone who does, but his is not a diary per se, just a short comment on his feelings about the content and author.
The author of THE DICTIONARY OF IMAGINARY PLACES and READING PICTURES, he is well grounded in the business of reading and writing. His observations and opinions may not be the same as someone who lives in Tennessee, but that's the paradox of our global existence these days. It's good to at least try to understand how the other person thinks. All good minds don't think along the same avenues, and that's what makes us unique.
"I realize that I think in fragments" November 5, 2005
16 out of 16 found this review helpful
About 3/4 of the way through Manguel's account of rereading one of his favorite books every month for a year, he writes "I realize that I think in fragments". This self-enlightenment serves as pretty good summation of his slim combination of literary criticism and memoir. Over the course of his project, he sets up a new home in rural France, takes trips to his native Argentina, Canada, Sweden, Germany, Italy, and the UK, hosts visits from his adult children, and follows the buildup to the war on Iraq. All the while, his rereading occurs, and he manages to tease out relevant insights from his favorite works in a kind of free-associative rambling. A longtime editor, anthologist, and writer, Manguel is something of a professional reader, and can seemingly draw upon a vast trove of quotations and passages at will. Thus, there appear quote after quote from a wide range of texts from which Manguel draws parallels to the one he's reading at the moment. It's rather daunting to be confronted with such a wide-range of knowledge and anecdote, and it's to Manguel's credit that it never once seems like showing off or obscurantism. That said, only a certain kind of person is likely to really enjoy the book, and a quick listing the twelve books he reads is likely to be a very useful guidepost:
The Invention of Morel (Adolfo Bioy Casares)
The Island of Dr. Moreau (Wells)
Kim (Kipling)
Memoirs From Beyond the Grave (Chateaubriand)
The Rule of Four (Doyle)
Elective Affinities (Goethe)
The Wind in the Willows
Don Quixote (Cervantes)
The Tartar Steppe (Dino Buzzati)
The Pillow Book (Sei Shonagon)
Surfacing (Margaret Atwood)
The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas (Joaquim Maria Machado De Assis)
So, essentially, a collection of eight world classics, several of which are "entertainments", one modern (ie. written in the last 50 years) novel, along with three relative obscurities. It goes almost without saying that the more of these you've read, the more likely you are to enjoy Manguel's ruminations of them. In sum, I have to admit that this is not at all the kind of writing I enjoy, but I know friends that would love it, and so it all comes down to personal taste. I did enjoy the profusion of lists that pop up in the book, as well as some odd little tidbits of history here and there and insights on the act of reading. I also found it rather amusing that one point, amidst all this rather high-culture rummaging, he mentions having read Thomas Harris's thriller "Hannibal" on the train.
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