Books like A reading diary by Alberto Manguel

Francine Prose shows how studying great writers—from Dostoyevsky to Joyce—reveals the craft of storytelling, urging readers to analyze language and technique in order to improve their own writing.

Alberto Manguel’s essay collection explores the Platonic concept of the library, weaving together thoughts on history, culture, architecture, and the joy of reading.

"In this major collection of his essays, Alberto Manguel, whom George Steiner has called “the Casanova of reading,” argues that the activity of reading, in its broadest sense, defines our species. “We come into the world intent on finding narrative in everything,” writes Manguel, “landscape, the skies, the faces of others, the images and words that our species create.” Reading our own lives and those of others, reading the societies we live in and those that lie beyond our borders, reading the worlds that lie between the covers of a book are the essence of A Reader on Reading. "The thirty-nine essays in this volume explore the crafts of reading and writing, the identity granted to us by literature, the far-reaching shadow of Jorge Luis Borges, to whom Manguel read as a young man, and the links between politics and books and between books and our bodies. The powers of censorship and intellectual curiosity, the art of translation, and those “numinous memory palaces we call libraries” also figure in this remarkable collection. For Manguel and his readers, words, in spite of everything, lend coherence to the world and offer us “a few safe places, as real as paper and as bracing as ink,” to grant us room and board in our passage." - from [Yale University Press][1] [1]: http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/book.asp?isbn=9780300159820