Of Resolutions And Reading Lists

Author Alberto Manguel’s compendium on twelve books he loves can perhaps act as an incentive for one to abide by a reading list for the new year

- Aparna Andhare

A good way to begin a year is with a diet, a promise to be a better person and a reading plan, of course. Alberto Manguel’s A Reading Diary: A Year of Favourite Books, can be your inspiration, come 2019. It is a rereading and reflection project started on his 53rd birthday, when he carefully picked twelve books he loved, one for each month. Manguel is, by his own admission, an eclectic reader, and the choice of books represents his own biblio-journey, as it played out in 2002, and over a lifetime.

Alberto Manguel is a writer passionate about the written word. His list of anthologies runs long, and is an author, critic, translator, historian, and serves as the director of the National Library of Argentina. As a teenager, he read books out loud to Jorge Luis Borges, who was rapidly losing his eyesight, but was a regular at the bookshop where Manguel worked after school. He has spent a considerable amount of time travelling, living in [exotic] cities around the world, stating he never thought he could stay anywhere beyond a couple of years. He wrote this book mainly in his new home— a restored medieval presbytery in rural France, where he was in process of setting up his own library. Organising the collection is significant to the book, which takes shape as he classifies books, putting them in various parts of his new home. He shares his memories of buying various editions and translations, giving the reader an insight into his book-collecting habit. Most of all, he is invested in the act of reading, its history, and the physical spaces like the library, all of which are an integral part of this short but fun-filled book.