Early in his celebratory yet factual exploration of the small daily miracle we all indulge in, Manguel remarks: "told that we are threatened with extinction, we, today's readers, have yet to learn what reading is. Our future the future of the history of our reading - was explored by St Augustine, who tried to distinguish between the text seen in the mind and the text spoken out loud". Now with the physical presence of books under threat, the idea of texts being carried in the mind rather than on paper may not be as frightening as it seems in Bradbury's cautionary Fahrenheit 451. Ultimately a book's ability to live in the mind is the test of its immortality. Reading is also often an act of listening, whether it is, as the author recalls, reading aloud as a boy back home in Buenos Aires to the then blind Borges; or flocking to witness the lively performances of Dickens enacting his novels; or, like the Cuban cigarrollers who emigrated to Key West, being read to. "Workers who had spent several years in the cigar factories were able to quote from memory long passages of poetry and even prose," reports Manguel. As random as memory and reading themselves, his narrative - which samples a huge variety of world literature - travels through the personal, such as his visit to Iraq to see the ruins of Babylon and the Tower of Babel, to the sentences of Rilke as a translator and of Rebecca West exclaiming, on reading King Lear, "What in the world is this emotion?" Throughout this book reading emerges as a silent teacher, an entertainment, a form of escape, a quest with a secret to reveal; and Manguel's treasure chest carries its scholarship and awareness of human history with grace and imagination.
