Into the Looking Glass Wood: Essays on Words and the World Book

Following his celebrated A History of Reading, Alberto Manguel has collected a number of his powerful and various essays on the topic of words and world. Linked by scenes from Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass--a reading treasured since Manguel's childhood--these essays range widely: from "Borges in Love" to "The Death of Che Guevara" (one of the most impressive essays here), from the autobiographical "On Being Jewish" ("Am I a Jew?") to "Browsing in the Rag-and-Bone Shop" (an indictment of the "literary pretensions" of Bret Easton Ellis's notorious American Psycho. Certain themes run through the book: the role, and ethics, of reading and writing in a world so often violent, or murderous; the exploration of literature and/as prejudice (Chinua Achebe's assessment of Conrad's Heart of Darkness as a "racist" text); the problem of literary catalogues: the difficulty not only of knowing what to read (the question of reviewing) but, more urgently, how to read. As a reader, Manguel sets a beguiling example, dwelling in the land of books, laying down the wager of words to "give the world coherence"; as a writer, he uses those words to challenge his readers to read--more and differently. --Vicky LebeauRead More