Rational Reading Animals

Thirty-nine occasional essays compose A Reader on Reading by Alberto Manguel, who has traveled widely both through the world and through the worlds of books. He is a multilingual cosmopolite who in an essay sails from Treasure Island to the Divine Comedy. As Carlos Fuentes writes, language "became the center of my personal being," so books are the core of Manguel's life. Like Fuentes he is the son of a diplomat, Argentina's ambassador to Israel, and much of his writing is autobiographical, mirroring movements across the globe and through cultures as he discovers his writing self. As much as actual places matter to him, so do imagined places. His personal library consists of thirty thousand books, and his geography, he writes, is mapped by his readings: "Experience, memory, desire color and shape it, but my books define it. My Oregon belongs to Ursula K. Le Guin, my Prague to Gustav Meyrink, my Venice to Henry James, my Algeria to Rachid Boudjedra."

Excerpts from Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass provide the skeleton on which Manguel arranges his essays—books being rabbit holes leading to topsy-turvy wonder, and pages becoming looking glasses through which the reader walks. People, he states, are, "at the core, reading animals," and reading is "that most human of creative activities." Reading increases vocabulary, enabling a person to see, indeed to create, the world. An experience remains unlived until words bring cognizance. Thus nonreaders wander through their days unseeing and not experiencing. Moreover, because their vocabularies are thin, such people cannot think beyond convention and become the dupes of platitude. Of course in Carroll's books little is straightforward. In the wood "where things have no names" Alice meets a fawn. Because names have vanished, she does not realize the fawn is a wild animal. Similarly the fawn does not recognize Alice as human. Once Alice and the fawn leave the wood, words return, bring awareness and fear, and Alice and the fawn bolt in separate directions—Alice fleeing a deer, the fawn fleeing a human being. In this instance, instead of creating and expanding life, words limit by defining, making the reader wonder what life would be without verbal taxonomy: words that pin people like insects into species and that limit vision—words, for example, that refer to race or religion.

Manguel recounts that he spent a decade in Paris and London "reading in an almost perfectly haphazard way, dipping into books that were too expensive for me to buy, skimming over others that incautious friends had lent me, borrowing a few from public libraries for company rather than for instruction's sake, and hardly finishing anything." One should read A Reader on Reading in the same fashion, haphazardly, dipping into some essays and skimming others, not bothering to finish them. One should bite into ideas and ruminate, for this is a book that stimulates pondering. Increasingly universities have come to resemble wellness centers with English departments, in particular, offering courses with components of "service learning," instructors proselytizing, not simply attempting to increase knowledge but to convert and thereby effect moral and social change. "Literature," Manguel cautions, "does not offer solutions, but poses good conundrums. It is capable, in 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."

Manguel's expansive reading enables him to see similarities that might slip past the parochial reader. "Samson," he writes, "killing the Philistines by killing himself was metamorphosed into the Japanese kamikaze pilots, who in turn metamorphosed into the suicide terrorists whose carnage we suffer from now every day somewhere in the world." He also quotes well—e.g., Socrates's declaration that no man who conscientiously "prevents a great many wrongs and illegalities from taking place in the state to which he belongs, can possibly escape with his...