WHATCHU KNOW ABOUT MANGUEL'S "A HISTORY OF READING?"

I am taking a class for which I have to digest large portions of Alberto Manguel’s, A History of Reading for class on Tuesday night. At first, I didn’t know what to expect, but the book lives up to its title comprehensively; it's got this authoritative bent yet is mangy and long-haired and living in the arrondissment of books and bibliophiles; Manguel’s prose is precise and buttressed by his selection of lector behavior through the ages. The history really animates the book and Manguel knows his history.

It also doesn’t hurt that Manguel was a pubescent book pusher that was invited by none other than Jorge Luis Borges to come to his flat in Buenos Aires and read selections of Defoe or Kipling to the blind man. This was probably at the time when Borges was Director of the La Biblioteca Nacional de la Republica de Argentina , shortly after the institution moved to the armory where they housed the National Lottery. I mean the guy who reads to Borges, no matter how geeked to the rafters he is deserves a certain, distinct honor. Of course, Manguel is a hard-on but his prose contextualizes a heady subject, interesting, but heady nonetheless. A History of Reading is definitely cue-reading but it also one of those books that you want to write all over in. In fact, that's one of the Manguel's points: the way we read, for pleasure or fulfillment, is a pretty modern concept.

To drive these points home he first distinguishes between reading to oneself and reading aloud. Manguel writes that even reading a book to oneself, using your inner lector, is a pretty modern concept. Back then vicars, bishops, and other Stewards of Fiefdom Luxury Living thought of people reading to themselves, using their inner narrator public announcement module, as extremely crude, crass,and generally revolting. Reading to oneself silently was viewed as too onanistic, too pleasurable. Have you ever just stayed in bed all day and read a whole novel, cover to cover? I remember in the Spring of my first year of grad school in New England, I lounged in bed all morning because Denis Johnson's Jesus' Sonwas the most honest and kick me in me teeth short story swag that I had encountered in quite a while. It doesn't hurt that I was hung over or that an icy, miscreant wind was creeping in through the screen or that I was wearing my grisly new bathrobe.