Anyone read "The Library at Night" ?

[Ian Carmichael]

Here's a synopsis of it
"Inspired by the process of creating a library for his fifteenth-century home near the Loire in France, Alberto Manguel, the acclaimed writer on books and reading, has taken up the subject of libraries. 'Libraries', he says, 'have always seemed to me pleasantly mad places, and for as long as I can remember I've been seduced by their labyrinthine logic'. In this personal, deliberately unsystematic, and wide-ranging book, he offers a captivating meditation on the meaning of libraries. "Manguel", a guide of irrepressible enthusiasm, conducts a unique library tour that extends from his childhood bookshelves to the 'complete' libraries of the Internet, from Ancient Egypt and Greece to the Arab world, from China and Rome to Google.He ponders the doomed library of Alexandria as well as the personal libraries of Charles Dickens, Jorge Luis Borges, and others. He recounts stories of people who have struggled against tyranny to preserve freedom of thought - the Polish librarian who smuggled books to safety as the Nazis began their destruction of Jewish libraries; the Afghani bookseller who kept his store open through decades of unrest. Oral 'memory libraries' kept alive by prisoners, libraries of banned books, the imaginary library of Count Dracula, the library of books never written - Manguel illuminates the mysteries of libraries as no other writer could. With scores of wonderful images throughout, "The Library at Night" is a fascinating voyage through Manguel's mind, memory, and vast knowledge of books and civilizations."

Looks interesting. Any comments?

[Laura Gibbs]

Oooooooh, Ian, it does look interesting indeed. Please let me know if you read it and what you think of it.

My summer is already half-way over, and I have not really even begun to read all the things I had hoped to read.

But since that happens EVERY summer, I shouldn't be surprised, ha ha.

I've been having an amazed library experience thanks to the digitization of early printed books being undertaken now by so many different projects - GoogleBooks, InternetArchive, many different libraries in Europe. My main summer project has turned out to be collecting 365 Aesop's fables in elegiac verse form which I will collect and then publish as a book NEXT summer. I'm blogging two per day as I accumulate the materials: http://elegiacus.blogspot.com. What's striking to me about this project is that the most important resource I have for that book - a collection of almost 300 fables in elegiac verse by Hieronymus Osius (who even does elegiac verse retellings of the fables of Abstemius!!!) - is a book available to me ONLY thanks to a digitization project at the University of Mannheim. It's a completely obscure 16th-century book not to be found in any library on the continent where I live... but I have access to it thanks to the online presence of that library in Mannheim (and the help of a very nice librarian who even tracked down a page that was missed from the scan of the book). AMAZING. :-)

[Ian Carmichael]

Oh, wow! (To be fulsome about it.) I've finally got around to be reading this - and it's one of those liberating, horizon-expanding, exciting rambles - from his small and exquisite fulmination against booksellers who add irremovable price stickers (He envisages a place of gummy torment for them upon their demise!) to the wide and dark side: library- and book- burning; censorship and its escapes...

This is the feeling of reading that Perec lauds, the reading you do for sheer pleasure, that is not required of you, that is not grist for an academic mill, that is not foundational for a personal project, but just "for the bloody fun of it" (As Rod Laver and John Newcombe, so many years ago, titled their book on tennis.)

And part of the wonder, of course is co-discovery 'Ah! He's read that too. He's thought that too!' The other part is the surprise. I never thought of a library as defined by its exclusions. I never thought, 'til now, that a list of recommended works implies a (non-) list of unrecommended works. (What did Aristophanes and Aristarchus not recommend for the study of Homer and Hesiod?) And, hmm, 'never heard of them', 'never knew that' is a regular mental chorus...

And so I'm rebelling as the school year comes to its languid conclusion here in Oz (Senior College are undergoing examination, year 10 are preparing [?!] for a set of finals.) I'm not reading the worthy, the weighty and the relevant.

[Before this wonderful dalliance, I've rollicked my way through A S Byatt's Biographer's Tale, and in between watched the DVD The Name of The Rose (nicely subtitled 'A Palimpsest of the novel by Umberto Eco') - and yes, I've read the book, and much of Eco previously.]

And here's the educational rub - for so many students that I see, I can't see anything that enthuses them, entrances them, entraps them with passion and energy. I see desultory additions - to sms, to computer games, to football. I'm sure that's a blindness in me, an obdience to the 'hidden rules' of my class. The converse, of course, is that so many of my students can't see anything that enthuses &c. me...

Hm - I s'pose this should have been a blog...

Anyway - if you love books, and books about books, arcane erudition and obscure cultural details - from China, Japan, Arabia and the pre-Colombian American libraries - as well as western references - you'll love this book. If you don't, it's unlikely you'll have had patience to read down to here!

[Ellen Pham]

Last line made me laugh out loud, Ian... figures I would be both! I like to read about what other people are reading... it's like listening to movie reviews. I know it's highly unlikely I"ll see the movie (I just don't watch many at all) but I enjoy hearing about them- often more than I would have enjoyed watching them!

Actually, I might enjoy this one, but I wouldn't get all the references.

I hear you about worrying that students aren't interested in anything real... How are they going to get by when childhood ends? What is going to feed their spirits and hearts and hopes?

Perhaps we cannot see it from where we are : )

[Ian Carmichael]

Yes, that's what I worry - just because I don't see their enthusiasms that doesn't mean there aren't any, it may equally mean that their enthusiasms are in my blind spots. (But then, I think I've got pretty good educational/knowledge/wisdom vision - and if their enthusiasms are real but invisible to me, does that means that their interests don't intersect with knowledge/wisdom?)

[Ian Carmichael]

I'm now enjoying another of Manguel's masterpieces, A History of Reading. Snippets of books long gone by, the importance of the actual book which I first read - the reprints are just not the same! Just delightful. I have to create a little corner for Eco, Pennac, Manguel, Highet - and perhaps Bragg. The books about books - so fascinating, so exciting, so interesting. 'I didn't think he'd like that if he thought this was good!
And then there's Nigel Warburton's Philosophy How to (Ah, he calls it the essential study guide.) Brilliant help on effective reading, listening researching and writing.) I'm wandering off the strict educational path... and, as Maxwell Smart would say "loving it..."

Perhaps I'll be more focussed in a while... (Likely not though!) And then there's the whole stack of stuff from the library I've borrowed, and won't read before return time! Surely some of the information just leaches out and becomes infused by through proximity...