Book Review: "A Reader on Reading" by Alberto Manguel

Books about reading are always fascinating. I read a book recently entitled Wonderworks by Angus Fletcher and it is all about the science of storytelling told from the perspective of a reader. I read another book some months back entitled Ex Libris by Michiko Kakutani and again, a book about reading made the titles inside it come alive. The one thing I have always loved about books on reading is the fact that even though there are many secondary sources inside it, there is always something deeply personal about the book when it comes to the author. The author is searching within themselves to not only provide us with an amazing book on what we read and why, but also a deep personal experience that is relative to the wider story being told.

I think my fascination with this may have started with Italo Calvino's Why We Read the Classics? and there is a part in there where he states something about how everyone is always 'in the middle' and 'rereading' a classic rather than reading it for the first time. I think that Calvino hit the nail on the head when it came to discussing the reading process. But this book entitled A Reader on Reading has done so as well.

I love how this book starts off. We get not only a great anecdote of the author's childhood reading sessions of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, but we also get some important slices about the reading experience. The author talks about how they have read and reread the books over the years and yet, every single interpretation seems to be influenced by an outside force that does not form on its own.

AIDS and the Poet was another chapter I really enjoyed because of its contextual links to the debilitating illness and because of its talks about the connotations of that illness at the time compared to literary analysis. There is a very specific paragraph within that chapter which reads to start:

"This unanswered question is all-important. Literature, as we know too well, does not offer solutions, but poses good conundrums. It is capable of telling a story, of laying out the infinite convolutions and the intimate simplicity of a moral problem, and of leaving us with the conviction of possessing a certain clarity with which to perceive not a universal, but a personal understanding of the world."

The paragraphs follow to discuss certain literary characters and circumstance, as if, like AIDS in the 80s and 90s, we had misunderstood it entirely and the mass interpretation of it had been shrouded with influence of what we thought we were supposed to believe.

Metaphor builds on metaphor, quotation builds on quotation...

One question I enjoyed was of whether Lady Macbeth in Shakespeare's tragedy Macbeth was a villain or a victim of her position. Whether we are supposed to fear her, or whether we are supposed to pity her remains a great question now when we read her character or see her on the stage. There is a great difference between the villainy portrayed in the film version by Dame Judi Dench and the later film version by Marion Cotillard.

With each chapter beginning with a quotation from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, we definitely as the readers get a feeling that this is all linked together by some fine thread. We get talks of how the author was in hospital, grateful for his copies of Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes, to keep him sane and hopeful. We get questions about books as they are sold, books as they are read and books as they are interpreted. It is a book that all readers are grateful for.