The Art of 1600s Books...

Alberto Manguel's reading list for the book "A Reading Diary" includes Cervantes' "Don Quixote." Manguel quotes extensively from "Don Quixote" and the reader walks away with a great deal of the story. It must be an art to summarize entire sections of books this way. What to keep and what not to include? It is definitely a tough call. What I remember the most about "Don Quixote" are the times when my sisters and I would watch the old Mexican produced film version in Spanish and laugh at the absurdity of Sancho Pansa. It was a lovingly made film and I still remember some of its scenes. Some people theorize that Don Quixote is mentally ill because he read too much--spent too much time in his library. Perhaps I will end up like him.

Manguel on borrowing books: "I feel uncomfortable having other people's books at home. I want to either steal them or return them immediately. There is something of the visitor who outstays his welcome in borrowed books. Reading them and knowing that they don't belong to me gives me a feeling of something unfinished, half enjoyed. This is also true of library books." Over the years I have been collecting books at the same rate I read them, voraciously. I mark my books so borrowing from a library really doesn't help my case much. I do, however, borrow computer books from friends and from the library. I use them to teach myself and then have little or no attachment to them in the end.

I almost forgot to mention what Manguel writes regarding reading more than one book at a time. He says it is like two voices that enjoys at different times of the day. I am thinking of doing the same. I always read one book at a time and start thinking about what to read next on my list when I start getting close to the end. I don't know how it will go but I think I might want to try. Perhaps I will read twice as many books :-)

Growing Up Philistine...

Alberto Manguel's book has awakened in me feelings that had been dormant for quite a while. I grew up in a household where books were not a priority. We had an encyclopedia and that was about it. The reason I am bringing this up is to explain why I started reading so late in my life. I don't blame my parents for the lack of initiative to promote education; they were a product of the Depression, when reading was a luxury not many could afford. It's a sad fact, but it is true. What really brought me to the "life of the mind" was music. I listened to music constantly when I was growing up. One day I felt music the way many people feel religion: a spiritual awakening. I decided to teach myself to read music and eventually picked the cello as my instrument. Knowing Beethoven, Mozart, Bach and the rest opened up for me the world of intellectual pursuit. After that, philosophy, literature, history, science came easy to me, almost naturally. I knew my life had changed, but never imagined that it was going to draw such a barrier between my parents and myself.

Reading eventually caught up with me, and when it did it enveloped me completely revealing a new me, a part of my spirit I had never known before. The first two books that did me in as a reader were Dostoyevsky's "Crime and Punishment" and Garcia Marquez' "One Hundred Years of Solitude." I read them both in Japan during the summer of 1994. I traveled constantly between Osaka and Hikone and read mostly on the train. One night coming back from Osaka I was enthralled in my reading that I passed my station and realized it nearly an hour and a half later. That, I have been told, is a real reading experience, when everything else evaporates and nothing is left but the word on the page and in the mind. Manguel states in his book: "Maybe this is why we read, and why in moments of darkness we return to books: to find words for what we already know but can't describe." I know that I will never stop reading. For the rest of my life I intend to learn more, to love more and more the written word. I think this is the reason why Manguel's book has been so instrumental in awakening these feelings. I love the subtitle of the book: "A Passionate Reader's Reflections on a Year of Books." It is still January... how many more treasures to discover. The beginning of the year is like the beginning of life, tabula rasa and away we go to enjoy our books and learn more! We are more blessed than we can estimate in the limit of our minds.

A Reading Diary

Alberto Manguel's book is fascinating. I was surprised right away when he cites that he began his year-long reading list by re-reading Adolfo Bioy Casares' "The Invention of Morel," a novella I read when I was an undergraduate. He describes the story well, although I suspect he doesn't really want to summarize the story itself. "The Invention of Morel" is a story about a man who comes to an island in the Caribbean only to find that the island is full of images of people. You see, there's a machine which reproduces images over and over again. Bioy Casares' story is along the lines of Jorge Luis Borges "Ficciones." In fact, Bioy Casares and Borges were close friends, and together they defined the Latin American literary boom of the 1950s and 1960s. Alberto Manguel's mentioning of this story really took me back to the summer of 1994 when I read "The Invention of Morel" for the first time. It was summer and I was living in Japan then. I was a young reader; that is to say, I began my reading career rather late. It is for this reason that the mentioning of "The Invention of Morel" in Manguel's book means so much to me. Manguel is an experienced reader (and writer) and his observations are magnificent. For example, he very subtly compares the story of Morel with the financial crisis that Argentina (he is from Argentina) suffered in the early 2000s. He saw Buenos Aires as inhabited by ghosts, just like the images the narrator sees on the island. I think this is done very cleverly and Manguel pulls it off without seemingly wanting to. Here's a quote from the book that moved me: "Perhaps, in order for a book to attract us, it must establish between our experience and that of the fiction--between the two imaginations, ours and that on the page--a link of coincidences." Ever read a book thinking you have gone through a similar experience? For as much as I disliked "Run Between the Raindrops" I have to say that all the grunt speak, etc. really got to me. I love the idea of having my experience linked intricately to a book. I can think of no better companion, really. Manguel also writes about the link of word on the page and image in the mind. I am fascinated by this book. I will pace myself so as not to read too fast. I want to write at length about this.