Reading history

Author's name: Alberto Manguel

“Reading is as essential to life as breathing,” says Alberto Manguel. This man, who speaks and writes in many languages, has traced “written, read, and printed texts” across different historical eras: he searched for them in many libraries around the world, but also within himself. Like a Shakespearean course, Manguel offers us “the key to understanding the world.” He remembers the first word he read, speaks of his great passion for reading since his childhood, and recounts the story of his relationship with the great blind writer Jorge Luis Borges, to whom he read in Buenos Aires for two whole years, day after day. He then moves on to the beginnings of writing, the art of printing books, literature, the form of the book, and the act of reading and its power.

Manguel presents a selection of the world's greats who wrote and loved reading, such as Aristotle, Lovecraft, Ibn al-Haytham, Olver Sack, Maria Magdalene, Saint Augustine, and Rilke. He tells us the story of the Persian prince who took his library of 117,000 books on the back of a camel caravan, arranged alphabetically. He also mentions the story of the world's greatest book thief, the Duke of Libre, or the story of the tobacco workers in Cuba, who loved listening to books so much that they named their cigars after literary heroes.

Manguel talks about reading with the same passion that we readers feel all over the world.