A Reading Diary: A year of magical reading

Alberto Manguel’s A Reading Diary: A Year of Favourite Books is a library in prose form. A reader can stop at any of the numerous lists of books and authors catalogued here and simply search them on the internet to get immersed in a new world each time. Manguel is a reader first; an intellectual after that, and here he wants to know if some of these books delight his readers as much as they delight him. As the blurb suggests, it’s about a writer who decides to reread one book every month and develop a diary of sorts to keep a personal record, noting down his reflections. It’s from this eternal adulation for literature and life that this book was born. 

Quotes from Manguel’s favourite books and writers – from Austen to Kafka and Marguerite Yourcenar – keep popping up between passages; in between several notes on the 12 books that he discusses are also his thoughts on myriad ideas and experiences of travel, friendship, death, food, and of course, politics. These entries begin around June 2002 and conclude in May 2003, when the Iraq War was raging maniacally; the Bush administration comes under harsh scrutiny in Manguel’s writings.  

Manguel keeps looking up at the sky and tells us in sparse sentences how the weather was on a particular date; a cat keeps appearing asking to be fed. These everyday gestures make us journey with him from one book to another, but also from one day to the next. As a result, when we are reading about his thoughts on a book we perhaps haven’t read ourselves, or haven’t even heard of (which was the case with me for at least a couple of these titles), we are never left behind or alienated. Like a certain book had become Manguel’s companion during a month of his life, he becomes ours at this moment. 

Somewhere in A Reading Diary, Manguel writes about a morning when he looked at the books on his shelves – subjects of his undying affection – and realised that they have no knowledge of his existence. Manguel’s book, which is a fragmented love letter to a life of reading, explores this selfless relationship that readers share with their books.