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    Packing My Library: An Elegy and Ten Digressions
    Packing My Library: An Elegy and Ten Digressions
    Packing My Library: An Elegy and Ten Digressions
    Audiobook3 hours

    Packing My Library: An Elegy and Ten Digressions

    Written by Alberto Manguel

    Narrated by James Cameron Stewart

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    In June 2015 Alberto Manguel prepared to leave his centuries-old village home in France's Loire Valley and reestablish himself in a one-bedroom apartment on Manhattan's Upper West Side. Packing up his enormous, 35,000-volume personal library, choosing which books to keep, store, or cast out, Manguel found himself in deep reverie on the nature of relationships between books and readers, books and collectors, order and disorder, memory and reading. In this poignant and personal reevaluation of his life as a reader, the author illuminates the highly personal art of reading and affirms the vital role of public libraries.

    Manguel's musings range widely, from delightful reflections on the idiosyncrasies of book lovers to deeper analyses of historic and catastrophic book events, including the burning of ancient Alexandria's library and contemporary library lootings at the hands of ISIS. With insight and passion, the author underscores the universal centrality of books and their unique importance to a democratic, civilized, and engaged society.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateMar 20, 2018
    ISBN9781977374585
    Packing My Library: An Elegy and Ten Digressions
    Author

    Alberto Manguel

    Internationally acclaimed as an anthologist, translator, essayist, novelist, and editor, Alberto Manguel is the bestselling author of several award-winning books, including A Dictionary of Imaginary Places, with Gianni Guadalupi, and A History of Reading. Manguel grew up in Israel, where his father was the Argentinian ambassador. In the mid-1980s, Manguel moved to Toronto where he lived for twenty years. Manguel's novel, News from a Foreign Country Came, won the McKitterick Prize in 1992. In 2000, Manguel moved to the Poitou-Charentes region of France, where he and his partner purchased and renovated a medieval farmhouse. Célébrité internationale à plus d’un titre — il est anthologiste, traducteur, essayiste, romancier et éditeur — Alberto Manguel est l’auteur du Dictionnaire des lieux imaginaires, en collaboration avec Gianni Guadalupi, et d’une Histoire de la lecture, entre autres succès de librairie. Manguel a grandi en Israël où son père était ambassadeur de l’Argentine. Au milieu des années 1980, Manguel s’installe à Toronto où il vivra pendant vingt ans. Il reçoit le McKitterick Prize en 1992 pour son roman News from a Foreign Country Came. Depuis 2000, Manguel habite la région française de Poitou-Charentes, dans une maison de ferme du Moyen-Âge qu’il a achetée et remise à neuf avec son compagnon.

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    Reviews for Packing My Library

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    • 5/5
      A must-read/have for all serious bibliophile, to be read and reread at will.
    • 4/5
      A short set of meditations on the relationship between humans and books, starting out from Manguel's personal reaction to having to put his private library (35k books) into storage due to the sale of his house in France, and winding up with the more public dilemma of being put in charge of Argentina's National Library ("about 3-5 million books") and having to come up with a coherent formulation for the role of a national library in 21st century civic life. Walter Benjamin's essay "Unpacking my library", which gave Manguel his title, talks about the way the books we own have meaning as physical objects, carrying memories of the circumstances in which we acquired them or the people who owned them before us, something Manguel also feels quite strongly (can another copy of Don Quijote ever be the same as my copy?), but going beyond that he is also fascinated by the way books gain meaning from the decisions we take on how to shelve them and the sometimes unexpected company they find themselves in as a result. But he's soon off far beyond that, talking about the way books relate to reality, imagination and dreams, about religious ideas of the power of words and images, about books versus political oppression, about golems, Dante, Humpty-Dumpty, Jules Verne, Borges, and much else.
    • 5/5
      In a series interconnected essays and ten digressions, reader and writer Alberto Manguel ruminates on books and reading when he packed up a 16,000 volume library in France and moved, putting them in storage.Manguel and I have almost nothing in common on the service - he is of a different generation, a gay man, Argentinian but the son of a diplomat and extremely well-traveled and well-read. But I absolutely love reading his essays. I connect to his love for reading and books, even when we haven't read the same stories, because it's a source of pleasure and comfort to us both. My library is about 4% the size of his, but his thoughts on the feelings that boxing up - and then unboxing as you move to another stage in life - his library entails is one I could strongly relate to. Reading this was an absolute pleasure.
    • 4/5
      A typically Manguelian ramble through thoughts on libraries and books and their meanings to each of us. Nice for a quiet Sunday afternoon's read.
    • 4/5
      A short book of enjoyable literary digressions around Manguel’s thoughts on moving from France, where he had lived and built up a 35,000 volume personal library over about fifteen years. The book includes short segments of memoir, much literary history of books and libraries, and an attempt at an overarching argument about the importance of libraries to society.If you have enjoyed Manguel’s other books about books, then there is more bookish pleasure here, but it is a slight volume and readers would be better starting with a book such as his excellent A History of Reading.
    • 3/5
      Manguel had to move from a farm in France where his 35,000 volume library was housed in a separate building to a one bedroom apartment in NYC. In this book, he muses on his library and other book-related matters. However, he didn't have to dispose of any of his books--he just packed them all away carefully wrapped in tissue paper. So no hard decisions, although he won't have handy access to all his books.There were lots of good book quotes in this book, but I didn't really connect with most of the book. I found the focus more on the digressions than the books.2 1/2 starsHere is one quote I liked:"In the days of my youth for those of us who liked to read, the dictionary was a magical object of mysterious powers. In the first place, because we were told that here, in this small fat volume, was almost the entirety of our common language, that between the drab covers were all the words that named everything in the world that we knew and also everything in the world that we did not know, that the dictionary held the past (all those words spoken by our grandparents and great-grandparents, mumbled in the dark, which we no longer used) and the future (words to name what we might one day want to say when a new experience would call for them)."
    • 4/5
      Although this newest book by Manguel lacks some of the originality and sparkle of his earlier works, it serves as a reminder of the depth of erudition he controls. The framing device for the short work is the need to pack his home in France (for reasons he refuses to discuss, which I found oddly frustrating and even a bit hypocritical coming from someone who has spent his entire life consuming the revelatory writings of others), including the library in the rebuilt country barn. This project initiates a series of ruminations and digressions on various topics focusing on what it means to pack a library. Each section is individually interesting, but I found the ten digressions disruptive of flow of the central narrative. Manguel suggests that his age coupled with the fact that his library is packed and stored and no longer available for his consultation, as well as his new responsibilities as head of the Argentine national library (a post once held by his mentor, Jorge Borges), he may have reached the end of his writing career. That would indeed be a shame.