A reading diary,
By Alberto Manguel,
Westland, $ 17.50

Alberto Manguel is the book lovers? and the readers? delight. His range of reading is stagger- ing (he calls himself ?an eclec-tic reader??) and he pursues reading with a passion. Only such a person could have conceived of a book like A History of Reading which made him famous.

This is not a book on the scale of A History of Reading but the idea behind it is as novel and as attractive as that great book. A couple of years ago, after his fifty-third birthday, Manguel decided to reread a few of his favourite old books. It occurred to him then that by rereading a book a month, he might be able to complete, in a year, something ?between a personal diary and commonplace book: a volume of notes, reflections, impressions of travel, sketches of friends, of events public and private, all elicited by my reading?.

The books he chose were the following: The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares; The Island of Dr Moreau by H.G. Wells; Kim by Rudyard Kipling; Memoirs from Beyond the Grave by Fran?ois-Ren? de Chateaubriand; The Sign of Four by Arthur Conan Doyle; Elective Affinities by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe; The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame; Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes; The Tartar Steppe by Dino Buzzati; The Pillow Book by Sei Shonagon; Surfacing by Margaret Atwood; The Posthumous Memoirs of Br?s Cubas by Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis. The choice of books was deliberately varied and Manguel read them through 12 months beginning June 2002.

What was the purpose of this exercise? Here is Manguel offering his own statement of purpose: ?Scientists have imagined that, before the universe came into being, it existed in a state of potentiality, time and space held in abeyance ? ?in a fog of possibility?, as one commentator put it ? until the Big Bang. This latent existence should surprise no reader, for whom every book exists in a dream-like condition until the hands that open it and the eyes that peruse it stir the words into awareness. The following pages are my attempt to record a few such awakenings.?

Manguel wanders and takes his readers with him. Each book sets forth a new association of ideas, a new kind of stream of consciousness ? not of the writer but of the reader who, in turn, becomes the writer.

Reading Conan Doyle, Manguel ponders: ?What is The Sign of Four about? The search for balance as a cure for ennui. Balance is, perhaps, the main theme of every detective story. Revenge (a form of balance). Cause and consequence (another). Justice (another).

P.D.James: ?What the detective story is about is not murder but the restoration of order.???

Don Quixote brings to Manguel?s mind the description of the knight getting out of bed and going to look for his books and being unable to find the room in which he kept them. For Manguel, this is the ?perfect nightmare?. A verdict with which all book-lovers will surely agree.

Reading, Manguel believes, is a conversation. It is a dialogue provoked by words on a page. The reader responds in his own mind and in some cases notes his responses in the margins. Manguel writes, ?This comment, this gloss, this shadow that sometimes accompanies our favourite books, extends and transports the text into another time and another experience; it lends reality to the illusion that a book speaks to us and wills us (its readers) into being.??