Readings on Reading

I bought this book, Readings on Reading by Alberto Manguel (Océano Travesía publishing house), because I liked its title, simply for that reason. I imagined that, based on texts read by the author, he would share his perspective. My assumption turned out to be wrong. I had already read a book by this same author titled A History of Reading, and that one I really did like.

When comparing both books after having read them, this one I am reviewing left me somewhat disappointed. Honestly, I never found a guiding thread. At the very end of the book, when mentioning the Sources, the author writes: "The pieces gathered in this book have appeared in different forms in a series of publications, or were delivered as lectures." Perhaps that is why I couldn't find a guiding thread, or maybe I just failed to understand it.

It is not a bad book, nor an unpleasant one; there are some interesting and valid questions and reflections to rescue, which I took note of, as I always do with any book I read.

Although he mentions a variety of authors and texts, he does so to relate them to personal experiences, always keeping the book as the focal point. In the end, he ends up telling personal anecdotes over and over again, resorting frequently to religion—both the Bible and Judaism—over and over again, and just as many times to the work of Lewis Carroll and Alice's world. As I said, he mentions many authors, but not much more than that.

He writes in a simple style, and reading it is enjoyable. He interleaves texts, but always in relation to personal experiences; it feels more like an extended chapter of an autobiography.

Something caught my attention: I was looking for the printing date. In the vast majority of books, it can be found in the colophon, although I've noticed that several current editions no longer include it in the final note. This edition didn't have it. When I went to look for it in the first few pages and discovered that the original title is in English, I was surprised, since the author was born in Argentina and speaks Spanish, but wrote the text in English with the original title A Reader on Reading. Not only that, but it was translated into Spanish by Juan Elías Tovar—meaning by a translator and not by the author himself.

Near the end, when "The Library as Home" begins, things get somewhat interesting, although one must also consider that it reads almost like a plea in defense and favor of physical books over digital ones, something he had already done in his other book, A History of Reading.

Something I found interesting—and I even saw myself reflected in it, imagining it must be a common experience for many people, something many have gone through at some point—is on page 29, where he says: "School homework, of course, didn’t count. 'Compositions,' as they were called, required one to fill a couple of pages on a given subject, always closer to reporting than to fiction. Imagination was not required. 'Portrait of someone in your family,' 'What I did on Sunday,' 'My best friend' all elicited a sugary, polite prose, illustrated with colored pencils with an equally cordial portrait of the person or event in question, and all submitted to the scrutiny of the teacher who graded for accuracy and spelling mistakes. Only once did I stray from the assigned topic. The title we were given was 'A Sea Battle,' the teacher no doubt imagining that the students, all boys, had the same enthusiasm for war games that he did. I had never read the books about the air force and soldiers that several of my classmates enjoyed, the 'Biggles' series, for example, nor those of abbreviated histories of the world wars, full of illustrations of airplanes and tanks, printed on thick, spongy paper. I realized that I completely lacked the vocabulary required for the task. Therefore, I decided to interpret the title differently and wrote a description of a battle between a shark and a giant squid, no doubt inspired by an illustration from one of my favorite books, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. I was surprised to discover that my inventiveness, rather than amusing him, infuriated the teacher, who told me (with all due reason) that I knew very well he had meant something else. I believe this was my first attempt at writing a story."

Something similar happened to me in the early years of secondary school. The teacher—who wasn't much of a teacher; aside from this anecdote, I remember nothing of her "teaching"—having brought up the topic of fables (not because she wanted to, but because she was following unit by unit what a textbook indicated, which in turn had been written by someone to "guide the teacher," and these teachers followed it step by step)—on that occasion, in that class, the topic presented by the subject's book was fables. The explanation given was nothing more than reciting what the book indicated, and when the class hour ended, homework was assigned. The teacher said verbatim: "for the next class, invent a fable." Back then, I had a photocopied book of classic fables, to which I added a few other fables I read from other texts. Compared to other classmates (not all of them) who had no idea what a fable was, I had read quite a few. I got home, and when I set out to do the homework, I took the prompt literally and stuck strictly to the given instruction. And it said "invent." Inventing was something very different from copying. At least I always believed so. As best as I could, I invented a fable featuring domestic animals, very simple and poorly made—poorly made, but invented exactly as laid out in the instruction. On the day of the class, the "teacher" had us read the homework. Two or three of us read our inventions, and they turned out to be displeasing to the "teacher." The rest of the class didn't do the homework (nor did they receive any reprimand), and one classmate read hers, which turned out to be a shameless verbatim copy of a fable by Samaniego. Of course, the classmate who "copied verbatim" was the one who received congratulations. Unfortunately, that was what Language and Literature education was like for three years, and there are people who, in their role as "teachers" or "professors," take on pathetic roles in the classroom. Needless to say, it never happened to me again to naively believe a literal instruction and act accordingly.

Reading this book, Readings on Reading, comforted me to find that anecdote by the author—something similar to mine, but about thirty years earlier—stories that repeat themselves, common to many of us who were once in a classroom.

(Originally published October 2, 2014)