Alberto Manguel on Reading.

Alberto Manguel is one of my favourite writers~he always has interesting things to say on all things literary. I found this article on the homepage of his website and I think it's worth quoting in full so see what you think.

"Manguel believes in the central importance of the book in societies of the written word where, in recent times, the intellectual act has lost most of its prestige. Libraries (the reservoirs of collective memory) should be our essential symbol, not banks. Humans can be defined as reading animals, come into the world to decipher it and themselves. The battle of every reader is therefore against the enforced education of stupidity in a consumer society that tries to turn every citizen into a buying automat incapable of reflection. In that sense, the act of reading becomes subversive, since it can lead to questioning and thinking for oneself. The enemy is not, as some would want us to believe, the electronic technology. Manguel argues that the electronic technology is not in competition with the technology of the book: they apply to different fields of creative pursuit and overlap only occasionally; the perceived antagonism between both is fostered by mercantile interests to promote the sale of electronic products, constantly updated less for scientific or intellectual reasons than for purely commercial ones -- to sell more computers, not to elicit more ideas. Manguel also believes in the intrinsic illuminating and healing quality of literate texts when they allow constantly renewed readings and in-depth exploration. By literate text, Manguel means that which Northrop Frye defined as a classic: "a work whose circumference is always greater than that of the best of its readers." In his book Into the Looking-Glass Wood, Manguel wrote: "In the midst of uncertainty and many kinds of fear, threatened by loss, change and the welling of pain within and without for which one can offer no comfort, readers know that at least there are, here and there, a few safe places, as real as paper and as bracing as ink, to grant us roof and board in our passage through the dark and nameless wood." (Jean-Luc Terradillos)

http://www.alberto.manguel.com/