Friday, August 10, 2007

Tantalus for readers

Last week I spent some time dipping into Alberto Manguel's quite wonderful A History of Reading.

My only complaint about it is very unreasonable: because I have been thinking and reading about exactly these questions for pretty much my entire conscious life, Manguel's material is rather too familiar to me. On the bright side, he has saved me the trouble of writing this book myself, which is a very good thing!

Everyone who has a thing about reading should read this book, it's excellent; the passages that most caught my imagination come at the start of the conclusion, and are too long for me to transcribe, but print out these couple pages and I defy you not to want to procure a copy of this volume at your earliest convenience...

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