A Reader on Reading

<P>In this major collection of his essays, Alberto Manguel, whom George Steiner has called &#8220;the Casanova of reading,&#8221; argues that the activity of reading, in its broadest sense, defines our species. &#8220;We come into the world intent on finding narrative in everything,&#8221; writes Manguel, &#8220;landscape, the skies, the faces of others, the images and words that our species create.&#8221; Reading our own lives and those of others, reading the societies we live in and those that lie beyond our borders, reading the worlds that lie between the covers of a book are the essence of <I>A Reader on Reading.</I></p><P>The thirty-nine essays in this volume explore the crafts of reading and writing, the identity granted to us by literature, the far-reaching shadow of Jorge Luis Borges, to whom Manguel read as a young man, and the links between politics and books and between books and our bodies. The powers of censorship and intellectual curiosity, the art of translation, and those &#8220;numinous memory palaces we call libraries&#8221; also figure in this remarkable collection. For Manguel and his readers, words, in spite of everything, lend coherence to the world and offer us &#8220;a few safe places, as real as paper and as bracing as ink,&#8221; to grant us room and board in our passage.