A History of Reading. Alberto Manguel.

A History of Reading
Alberto Manguel
New York: Penguin Books USA, Inc. 1996.

I thought I knew all there was to know about reading until I came across this book. Manguel's ideas gave me plenty to think about. Here are some of his ideas. RayS.

A major question: who controls reading, the writer or the reader?

We find in books traces of our lives.

Reading is an excuse for privacy.

Reading out loud modifies solitary reading.

Readers have the reputation for authority and perceived power.

Ever have this happen to you? Your mother sees you reading and says, "Go out and play." Reading is seen as disdainfully exclusive and excluding.

The act of reading includes skipping, browsing, selecting and rereading.

Reading requires the coordination of a hundred different skills.

We discover a word because we already have the object or action it refers to in our minds.

Readers generate meaning by constructing relations between their knowledge, memories of experience and the written sentences, paragraphs and passages.

Silent reading was not usual in the West until the 10th century. Well into the Middle ages, readers assumed they would hear, not just see the text. The separation of letters into words and sentences developed gradually.

Silent reading was considered dangerous because the exchange of meaning between book and reader was not witnessed.

Emerson wanted readers to summarize their findings for others because there were too many books to read. This is what I had in mind with this blog, but no one is out there who is interested.

Augustine: learn phrases you like by heart; meditate on them so that when you're sick they will have been written on your mind. Memorize poems because they can keep you company on days when you don't have a book.

We never return to the same book or even the same page.

A neverending issue with professional reading educators is between phonics and whole language. Phonics breaks words apart and puts them back together again in order to recognize the words in print already in your vocabulary. Whole language throws the word at you whole. This method was called disparagingly by Rudolph Flesch, "Look-see." In 1787, Nicolas Adam, a Frenchman, compared using phonics to giving students the parts of a shirt before showing the shirt. False dichotomy. You need both phonics and whole language, the former to recognize words you already know and the second to visualize words that cannot be sounded out. This issue will never be resolved unless we agree to use both methods.

Socrates: only that which the reader already knows can be activated by reading.

Kafka: one reads in order to ask questions.

Two different ways of reading the Bible among Jewish scholars in the sixteenth century. Sephardic schools of Spain summarized the contents of a passage with little discussion of the details.The Ashkenazi schools, based largely in France, Poland, and the Germanic countries, analyzed every word and line, searching for every possible sense.

Every text is unfinished because the reader must add his knowledge and response.

Kafka: read only books that bite and sting us.

Rich history of reading aloud to adults. Young women were expected to sew and listen to a book being read aloud while awaiting visitors.

Two points of view about being read to: we must surrender to the reader's pace. The reader must read in a straightforward manner without skippiing or returning to a passage.

Technology promotes rather than eliminates that which it is supposed to supersede.

Eight million books in the 16th century. 359,437 new books (not counting pamphlets, magazines and periodicals), were added to the vast collection of the Library of Congress in 1995.

One can transform a place by reading in it.

We are what we read.

Gulliver's Travels is a humorous novel of adventure; under sociology, it is a satirical study of England in the eighteenth century; under children's literature, an entertaining fable about dwarfs, giants and talking horses; under fantasy, a precursor of science fiction; under travel, an imaginary voyage; under classics, it is a part of the Western literary canon.

We read through our experiences.

Attributing one's opinions to authorities is a way of avoiding criticism.

Every reader has been criticized for reading.

Accumulating books is not knowledge. Many use books not for study but for decoration.

The shelves of books we haven't written are as vast as the books we have not read.

All the best. RayS.