Book Lover’s Paradise

If he were stopped at one of the many borders he transgresses and forced to declare only one nationality, I suspect that the French-residing, Argentinian-born Canadian Alberto Manguel would respond "reader." It seems to me that, like his mentor Jorge Luis Borges, this is what he principally is. Again and again in his career, he returns to the book — most recently, in The History of Reading, With Borges, A Reading Diary: A Year of Favourite Books and now in his account of libraries and his own personal library, The Library at Night. For some years now, Manguel, an extraordinary bookman, has been constructing a series of meditations on why, how and where men and women read.

Alberto Manguel reads for consolation. He does not elaborate on what he means by consolation. Certainly reading offers its practitioners a measure of consolation. The self, no matter how grand, is small, and life, no matter how dream-extended, is short. Each of us is confined to...