A Reading Diary: A Passionate Reader's Reflections On A Year Of Books - Hardcover

If you don't have room in your case for twelve of your own favourites, A Reading Diary would be the best substitute. -- Stephanie Merritt * * Observer * * Inspirational and enormously entertaining. * * Big Issue * * An elegant, quaint and sensitive meditation on the nature of reading . . . * * TLS * * A delightfully companionable example of unpretentious erudition and an encouragement to its readers to keep a diary of this sort. -- Anita Brookner * * Spectator * * Just the book for the summer . . . it is intensely interesting and warmly rewarding, rather like a walk with an amiable but dangerously intelligent companion. -- David Blunt * * Literary Review * *

While travelling in Calgary, Alberto Manguel was struck by how the novel he was reading (Goethe's Elective Affinities) seemed to reflect the social chaos of the world he was living in. An article in the daily paper would be suddenly illuminated by a passage in the novel; a long reflection would be prompted by a single word. He decided to keep a record of these moments, rereading a book a month, and formed A Reading Diary: a volume of notes, impressions of travel, of friends, of public and private events, all elicited by his reading. From Don Quixote (January) to The Sign of Four (October) to The Wind in the Willows (December), Manguel leads us on an enthralling adventure in literature and life, and demonstrates how, for the passionate reader, one is utterly inextricable from the other.