Reading Pictures A History of Love and Hate

Following his acclaimed bestseller A History of Reading, Alberto Manguel draws us into the storied world of pictures and paintings. This illuminating book could well change the way we 'read' the visual world around us, and certainly help open our eyes and minds to its astonishing riches. Taking a handful of extraordinary images - photographed, painted, built, sculpted - Manguel explores how each one attempts to tell a story that we, the viewer, must decipher or invent- from the secret canvases of the Renaissance artist Lavinia Fontana and the disturbing work of the Canadian painter Marianna Gartner, to Picasso's celebrated 'Weeping Woman' and Peter Eisenman's Holocaust Museum in Berlin. But Reading Pictures is not about art history or theory - it is about the astonishing pleasures and surprises of stories.