Where Have All The Stories Gone?

It is fitting that quotations taken from Lewis Carroll’s Alice books should be a connecting thread prefacing each work in Alberto Manguel’s new collection of essays, A Reader on Reading, an assembly of pieces previously published in Geist, TLS and elsewhere that explores Manguel’s passion for the printed word. Indeed, to examine the state of reading today is to admit that we have fallen very far down the proverbial rabbit hole with little sense of where we are going to land. The Wonderland of reading today, a strange landscape of floundering publishing houses, dying newspapers, digital reading devices, status updates, blogs, tweets, cell phone novels, indecipherable text-speak and illiterate youth, is as perplexing as Alice’s bizarre adventure.

The matter of how we consume text for pleasure and for purpose—on paper, on...