Argues that the activity of reading & finding narrative in all things helps to define humankind, & explores the crafts of reading & writing as well as the links between politics & books.In this major collection of his essays,Alberto Manguel, whomGeorge Steinerhas called“the Casanova of reading,”argues that the activity of reading, in its broadest sense, defines our species. “We come into the world intent on finding narrative in everything,” writesManguel, “landscape, the skies, the faces of others, the images & words that our species create.” Reading our own lives & those of others, reading the societies we live in & those that lie beyond our borders, reading the worlds that lie between the covers of a book are the essence ofA Reader on Reading.Thethirty-nine essaysin this volume explore the crafts of reading & writing, the identity granted to us by literature, the far-reaching shadow ofJorge Luis Borges, to whom Manguel read as a young man, & the links between politics and books & between books & our bodies. The powers of censorship & intellectual curiosity, the art of translation, & those “numinous memory palaces we call libraries” also figure in this remarkable collection. For Manguel & his readers, words, in spite of everything, lend coherence to the world & offer us “a few safe places, as real as paper & as bracing as ink,” to grant us room & board in our passage.