A Reading Diary - A Year of Favourite Books

Alberto Manguel

ISBN 10: 0676975909 / ISBN 13: 9780676975901

Published by Alfred A.Knoff, Toronto, CA, 2004

About this Item

First printing. Well bound in beige cloth boards, with gilt titling to spine. Spine ends and corners are all fine with just a touch of bumping to spine ends. Text pages and b/w illustrations are all fine with no markings or inscriptions, just a little dust marking to closed edges. Flat signed by author on title page. Dust jacket is unclipped with just some slight shelf wear. Dispatched same or next working day, in protective packaging,

Seller Inventory # 015511

Bibliographic Details

• Title: A Reading Diary - A Year of Favourite Books
• Publisher: Alfred A.Knoff, Toronto, CA
• Publication Date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0676975909
• ISBN 13: 9780676975901
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Condition: Near Fine
• Dust Jacket Condition: Near Fine
• Signed: Signed by Author(s)

About this title

Synopsis

The must-have literary book of the season! Over the course of a year, the bestselling author of A History of Reading spends a month with each of his 12 favourite books, allowing us to observe both the heart of the reading experience and how life around us can be illuminated by what we read.

From June 2002 to may 2003, Alberto Manguel set out to reread twelve of the books he likes best, and to share with us, his “gentle readers,” his impressions and experiences in doing so. We travel with him as he leaves Canada to set up house in a medieval presbytery in France, visits his childhood home in Argentina and embarks on trips to various other places, always carrying a book in his hand.

The result is an immensely enjoyable collection for every lover of reading — something between an intimate diary, a collection of literary thoughts, and the best travel memoir. A Reading Diary ranges from reflections on much-loved writers — Margaret Atwood, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, H. G. Wells, Cervantes — to seductive introductions to others about whom you will want to know more, such as Sei Shonagon and Adolfo Bioy Casares, simultaneously providing insights into the world of today, its changing seasons and pleasures, its shifting politics and wars — all illuminated by the great novel he is reading at the time.

A Reading Diary is a walk through a year’s worth of best beloved books in the company of an eclectically learned friend. Touching on themes of home and wandering, memory and loss, Alberto Manguel perfectly traces the threads between our reading and our lived experience.

Excerpt from A Reading Diary:
June
Saturday
We have been in our house in France for just over a year, and already I have to leave, to visit my family in Buenos Aires. I don’t want to go. I want to enjoy the village in summer, the garden, the house kept cool by the thick ancient walls. I want to start setting up the books on the shelves we have just had built. I want to sit in my room and work.

On the plane, I pull out a copy of Adolfo Bioy Casares’s The Invention of Morel, the tale of a man stranded on an island that is apparently inhabited by ghosts, a book I read for the first time thirty, thirty-five years ago. . . .

About the Author

Internationally acclaimed as an anthologist, translator, essayist, novelist and editor, Alberto Manguel is the author of several award-winning books, including A Dictionary of Imaginary Places and A History of Reading. He was born in Buenos Aires, became a Canadian citizen in 1982, and now lives in France, where he was named an Officer of the Order of Arts and Letters. His most recent book is Stevenson Under the Palm Trees.