At the risk of repeating myself, I loved this book.  Manguel is a fascinating character and a wonderful writer.  The son of a Jewish Argentinian diplomat, he spent his first six years in Israel and then returned to Argentina for school.  He left during the military dictatorship and ‘disappearances’ moving to Canada, Tahiti, England, France, Italy and finally returning to Buenos Aires as the Director of the National Library in 2015.  Along the way, he has written dozens of books and newspaper and magazine articles and given distinguished lectures all over the world.  His previous book about reading was entitled ‘The History of Reading’.

The title of this book is both a riff on Walter Benjamin’s essay “Unpacking my Library” and the occasion for contemplating the role of his own library as well as public libraries in the world.  Manguel had moved to France in 2000 and bought a medieval presbytery which came with a wood paneled library to house his 40,000 volumes.  Moving to Buenos Aires 15 years later, he had to pack up the entire library which led to wide-ranging thoughts about reading, books, libraries, and the role of the reader/writer in achieving a just world.  He left Argentina in 2020 to become the Director of the Center for Research in the History of Reading in Lisbon, Portugal to which he had donated his library.

The book is too wonderfully dense and important to easily summarize.  Nearly every page bears my marginalia, checks, stars, double checks, etc, as I sighed and nodded with his observations.  His rich trove of quotes netted these two favorites—Balzac wrote “An obsession is a pleasure that has attained the status of an idea” and Kafka’s “We read to ask questions.”  In beautiful prose, Manguel explores the wonder of words that can emerge infinitely from the 26 letters of the alphabet, all books simply being rearrangements of those letters.  In this he echoes one of his heroes, the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges, his predecessor as the Director of the National Library.  In digressions about dictionaries, translation and drafts of works, the relationship between art and power, and the comfort and empathy found in reading, Manguel has written a masterful book.  I urge you to read it to better understand what we seek and what we find in reading.