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📚 A Surprising - and Magical - History of Reading (New Book Notes)

One of my absolute favorite "books about books"

Author

Matt Karamazov
May 05, 2023 • Estimated Reading Time: 18 minutes

📚 Hey, good evening!

You can easily judge this book by its cover because it’s exactly what it says it is: a history of reading!

But it’s not THE history of reading, because, as the author Alberto Manguel says, the personal, intimate relationship between the solitary reader and their books can never be generalized to represent the complete “History of Reading.”

There can only be a history of reading, but this is one of the best books you’re ever likely to find on the subject.

Lately, I’ve been loving Why I Read, by Wendy Lesser, and The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction, by Alan Jacobs, is one of my favorite books, but you can’t go wrong with Manguel’s book either!

Below, I share a short summary of A History of Reading, by Alberto Manguel, as well as my complete book notes, along with some additional recommended reading.

There are lots of incredible literary surprises to be found in this book, so let’s get into it!

If you love books and you love to read, then you might like…

Today’s book is called A History of Reading, by Alberto Manguel, and in the summary below, we’ll get into some of the key takeaways, but here’s one of my favorite quotes, which is something that everyone reading this right now has experienced for themselves:

“And yet, all of a sudden, I knew what they were; I heard them in my head, they metamorphosed from black lines and white spaces into a solid, sonorous, meaningful reality. I had done this all by myself. No one had performed the magic for me. I and the shapes were alone together, revealing ourselves in a silently respectful dialogue. Since I could turn bare lines into living reality, I was all-powerful. I could read.”

To me, the ability to read is one of the closest things to magic that human beings are able to perform.

There was one day, not too long ago for some of you, when everything written in this email would have just been a bunch of squiggly lines with no discernible meaning.

You would never have had any idea that these shapes meant something, that you could decode them, and that they would have a message for you, a message that came directly from the mind of a totally different person, perhaps even half a world away.

I happen to think that’s pretty damn cool, and today’s book is full of awesome passages like the one above.

As always, my book notes and summary for this book are available on my Patreon, as well as my personal notes from more than 1,150+ other books. Updated monthly.

The support I’ve received on Patreon over the years has been nothing less than incredible. It honestly just started out as a way to make some extra money, but it’s become so much more than that.

First off, I want to mention two of my biggest supporters by name, Jeremy Steingraber and Denisse Nantes!

Everyone’s support helps, of course, but to have someone believe in me and my work to the extent that they do is just…I can’t even put it into words without swearing haha.

I appreciate the hell out of everyone who supports me on Patreon, which is basically what I’m saying, and I want to help you out too by sharing my best book notes and summaries on there for you to enjoy and profit from.

There are plenty of other cool rewards available too, but the main thing is that you get more than 1,150+ summaries and thousands of pages of book notes for just $1! 

They’re updated monthly with all the new books I’ve been reading and taking notes on, but I do have to say that my earliest book notes need to be updated, and I’m working on that.

Just to be fully upfront with you guys.

I mean, they’re very good, but my notes from 2020 onwards are much more in-depth and complete than the ones from, say, 2015.

Back then, I was taking notes just for myself, but now I have to go back and make sure that other people can navigate them easily as well!

I should have them all updated by the end of the year, though, and my latest reads are updated monthly.

But again, thank you to everyone for either supporting me on Patreon or even considering doing so, and you can click here for my complete notes from today’s book and more than 1,150+ other books too.

Happy reading!

This is easily one of the most fascinating and exciting “books about books” you’re ever likely to find.

Part of what makes this book so special is the author himself, Alberto Manguel, and how he weaves personal stories of his own well-traveled life throughout, including how the famous writer Jorge Luis Borges came into the bookstore Manguel was working at as a teenager and asked Manguel to read to him; Borges had gone blind by this time.

There are chapters on “forbidden” reading, about the truly heinous attempts made by members of certain groups to stop members of other certain groups from reading; there are chapters on why and how human beings ever became able to read at all; there are chapters on libraries, reading at work, reading at school, reading in the unlikeliest of places.

History books don’t have the most thrilling reputation, but this one hooked me from beginning to end.

Easily one of my favorite books, this one can be enjoyed by anyone who has ever had the entire course of their lives changed by a book.

If you’re anything like me, you’ll finish the book gripped by this gratitude for the ability to read – and the easy access to books – and you’ll want the same ability and access for everybody the world over.

“Rabbi Levi Yitzhak of Berdichev, one of the great eighteenth-century Hasidic masters, was asked why the first page of each of the treatises in the Babylonian Talmud was missing, so that the reader was forced to begin on page two. ‘Because however many pages the studious man reads,’ the Rabbi answered, ‘he must never forget that he has not yet reached the very first page.’”

The playwright Jean Racine, when he was eighteen years old in 1658, had his books taken away and burned by the monks at the Abbey he was studying at. Twice, they interrupted his reading and consigned this particular book to the flames, whereupon he bought a third copy and learned the entire book by heart. He took the third copy of the book to one of the monks and said, ‘You can burn it now.’

-My own note, not a direct quote from the book

“By the mid-sixteenth century, a reader would have been able to choose from well over eight million printed books.”

“Whenever you read a book and come across any wonderful phrases which you feel stir or delight your soul, don’t merely trust the power of your own intelligence, but force yourself to learn them by heart and make them familiar by meditating on them, so that whenever an urgent case of affliction arises, you’ll have the remedy ready as if it were written in your mind.”

-Saint Augustine

“I don’t think I can remember a greater comprehensive joy than that of coming to the few last pages and setting the book down, so that the end would not take place until at least tomorrow, and sinking back into my pillow with the sense of having actually stopped time.”

“When I was ten or eleven, one of my teachers in Buenos Aires tutored me in the evenings in German and European history.

To improve my German pronunciation, he encouraged me to memorize poems by Heine, Goethe and Schiller, and Gustav Schwab’s ballad ‘Der Ritter und der Bodensee,’ in which a rider gallops across the frozen Lake of Constance and, on realizing what he has accomplished, dies of fright on the far shore. I enjoyed learning the poems but I didn’t understand of what use they might possibly be.

‘They’ll keep you company on the day you have no books to read,’ my teacher said.

Then he told me that his father, murdered in Sachsenhausen, had been a famous scholar who knew many of the classics by heart and who, during his time in the concentration camp, had offered himself as a library to be read to his fellow inmates.

I imagined the old man in that murky, relentless, hopeless place, approached with a request for Virgil or Euripides, opening himself up to a given page and reciting the ancient words for his bookless readers.

Years later, I realized that he had been immortalized as one of the crowd of roaming book-savers in Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. A text read and remembered becomes, in that redemptive rereading, like the frozen lake in the poem I memorized so long ago – as solid as land and capable of supporting the reader’s crossing, and yet, at the same time, its only existence is in the mind, as precarious and fleeting as if its letters were written on water.”

“One can transform a place by reading in it.”

“The earliest named author in history is a woman, Princess Enheduanna, born around 2300 B.C.”

“Those who can read see twice as well.”

-Menander

“In the tenth century, for instance, the Grand Vizier of Persia, Abdul Kassem Ismael, in order not to part with his collection of 117,000 volumes when traveling, had them carried by a caravan of four hundred camels trained to walk in alphabetical order.”

“Rooms, corridors, bookcases, shelves, filing cards and computerized catalogues assume that the subjects on which our thoughts dwell are actual entities, and through this assumption a certain book may be lent a particular tone and value.

Filed under Fiction, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels is a humorous novel of adventure; under Sociology, a satirical study of England in the eighteenth century; under Children’s Literature, an entertaining fable about dwarfs and giants and talking horses; under Fantasy, a precursor of science fiction; under Travel, an imaginary voyage; under Classics, a part of the Western literary canon. Categories are exclusive; reading is not – or should not be.

Whatever classifications have been chosen, every library tyrannizes the act of reading, and forces the reader – the curious reader, the alert reader – to rescue the book from the category to which it has been condemned.”

William Golding signed so many of his books that he once said, “One day, someone is going to find an unsigned William Golding novel and it’s going to be worth a fortune.”

(My own note, not a direct quote from the book)

“Thomas Johnson, a slave who later became a well-known missionary preacher in England, explained that he had learned to read by studying the letters in a Bible he had stolen.

Since his master read aloud a chapter from the New Testament every night, Johnson would coax him to read the same chapter over and over, until he knew it by heart and was able to find the same words on the printed page. Also, when the master’s son was studying, Johnson would suggest that the boy read part of his lesson out loud.

‘Lor’s over me,’ Johnson would say to encourage him, ‘read that again,’ which the boy often did, believing that Johnson was admiring his performance.

Through repetition, he learned enough to be able to read the newspaper by the time the Civil War broke out, and later set up a school of his own to teach others to read.”

“Like no other human creation, books have been the bane of dictatorships.”

“It was here at Oxford that, for one of his examinations, he was asked to translate from the Greek version of the story of the Passion in the New Testament, and since he did so easily and accurately the examiners told him it was enough. Wilde continued, and once again the examiners told him to stop. ‘Oh, do let me go on,’ Wilde said, ‘I want to see how it ends.’”

“Read in order to live.”

-Gustave Flaubert

Currently, I don’t have a complete breakdown of A History of Reading published on the Stairway to Wisdom (my library of expert book breakdowns), but below I’ve listed some similar breakdowns that you may enjoy instead.

When you become a member of the Stairway to Wisdom, you’ll gain access to more than 100+ book breakdowns like these ones here, as well as a premium weekly newsletter that will help you build the kind of life for yourself that you’ll love living.

Human beings were never meant to read. Instead, the human brain had to REARRANGE ITSELF to be able to understand written symbols, and the successful completion of this fragile process is never guaranteed. Pick up this book if you want to learn more about the awesome miracle of reading.

30-Minute Read | 7,700 Words

If you left university with just a degree and a pile of debt, you were robbed. Universities today often force students to choose between learning and success - but it doesn't have to be this way.

18-Minute Read | 4,800 Words

The Bureau of Prisons in states across America project the number of prison beds they will need in the future based on third- or fourth-grade reading statistics. This book is about the state of reading in the digital age, and what we stand to lose.

22-Minute Read | 5,700 Words

That’s it! I hope you found these book recommendations helpful, and I’ll be back with even more books for you very soon!

Mere “information” is everywhere today, but what’s going to separate you (and give you the life you desire) is consistent, meaningful action, backed up with the most powerful ideas from the greatest books ever written.

That’s what I aim to provide you with.

I’m also putting in just as much work as I’m encouraging you to put in, and if you’d like to work together, we can talk about that.

You can apply to work with me directly on this page right here.

Together, we’ll look at where you are now, where you want to go, and how you can achieve your yearly goals in the next 90 days.

If that’s something you find intriguing, talk to me here.

With that said, I hope you enjoyed this edition of The Reading Life, and enjoy the rest of your day!

All the best,

Matt Karamazov

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