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Alberto Manguel's rambling, digressive A History of Reading is not exactly a history; more accurately, it's a series of often fascinating snapshots. Here we have a lector reading aloud to cigar rollers in a Key West cigar factory; there we have an account of great bibliokleptomaniacs (book thieves); and look, a photograph of Eleanor of Aquitaine's tomb, with its sculpture of Eleanor reclining, a book in her hands. Manguel provides chapters on iconography, translation, forbidden books, and the categorical schemes of libraries. Interspersed with such historical commentary are Manguel's reflections on his own life as a devout reader, including his vivid story of the evenings he spent as a teenager in his home town of Buenos Aires reading aloud to the blind and elderly Jorge Luis Borges.
Manguel is a learned and enthusiastic advocate for reading, and to his credit he disavows at the outset any narrative coherence: his book, he says, "skips chapters, browses, selects, rereads, refuses to follow conventional order." This language suggests that Manguel offers us a formal or structural imitation of how most of us read, and this is arguably appropriate; but his method is too jumpy for my taste. And taste will inevitably be the arbiter in judging a book of this kind, so frankly personal and anecdotal. It's interesting that in The Gutenberg Elegies, a plea for the value of reading, Sven Birkerts finds the reading of novels normative and so defends a slow, disciplined, linear attentiveness that contrasts strikingly with Manguel's protean fluctuations. When I first read Birkerts I complained about this emphasis, but I now realize that my sympathies are more with him than with Manguel.
Still, I learned a great deal from this historical jumble. Manguel is especially useful on the manifold ambiguities of reading. In a chapter called "Learning to Read" he notes that "in every literate society, learning to read is something of an initiation, a ritualized passage out of a state of dependency and rudimentary communication"; yet he also demonstrates that there have been many different methods of teaching reading, methods shaped not only by the teachers' goals but also by their fears. Some scholars (Socrates in Plato's Phaedrus seems to have been the first of these) worry that readers will suffer mnemonic atrophy: why memorize words that one can keep safely stowed on one's shelves—or on one's hard drive? (And indeed, since the invention of the printing press, steady rises in literacy levels have been accompanied by steady declines in the ability and willingness to memorize.) Other teachers, however, fear that the young reader will show insufficient reverence for the written word—thus a medieval Jewish ceremony described by Manguel:
On the Feast of Shavuot, when Moses received the Torah from the hands of God, the boy about to be initiated was wrapped in a prayer shawl and taken by his father to the teacher. The teacher sat the boy on his lap and showed him a slate on which were written the Hebrew alphabet, a passage from the Scriptures and the words "May the Torah be your occupation." Then the slate was covered with honey and the child licked it, thereby bodily assimilating the holy words.
(Manguel does not note the biblical echoes here, especially Ps. 19:10 and Ezek. 3:3.) A similar reverence led the schoolmen of the medieval universities to approach key philosophical texts by means of commentaries: only the advanced, proven students were worthy to read the classics themselves. On subjects such as these Manguel provides a bagful of provocative information.
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