Book Review: The Library at Night by Alberto Manguel

Book Review: The Library at Night by Alberto Manguel

“At night, here in the library, the ghosts have voices. (…) But at night, when the library lamps are lit, the outside world disappears and nothing but the space of books remains in existence. ”

– The Library at Night by Alberto Manguel

The Library at Night by Alberto Manguel is one of the greatest ‘bookish’ books I have ever read.

The Library at Night is a meditation on the meaning of libraries and the process of reading; it constitutes a homage to libraries of any kind and to the freedom of thought.

Alberto Manguel takes us on a fascinating voyage through the libraries across the centuries and civilizations ranging from the ancient China, Rome, Egypt, Greece, the Aztecs, private libraries of Jorge Luis Borges, Dickens, Aby Warburg, the library of Alexandria, the British Library and many more.

The Library at Night is divided into fifteen chapters, with each one being an essay on a particular meaning of the library as understood by Manguel, ranging from the library seen as myth, oblivion, home, imagination, power, survival, identity

Each essay contains plethora of quotes, anecdotes, wealth of knowledge, magical stories, and yet each chapter overflows with warmth and charm. These comprehensive, meticulously researched essays allow the reader to learn a lot about libraries, its locations, cataloguing systems, including Dewey Decimal System.

Furthermore, The Library at Night offers many reflections on the nature of literature itself and what it means to be a reader.

Continue reading “Book Review: The Library at Night by Alberto Manguel”
https://theexiledsoul.com/tag/albertomanguel/
theexiledsoul.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2021-21
124447
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:F4QUJL4AKSUAYIACASQANAEVWZI6C24Z
<urn:uuid:8bdf1d78-fd30-4749-b391-f10d83954d75>
2021-05-15T14:35:42Z
192.0.78.24
text/html
sha1:6CULQRW7EH6AW6ZVVYVS7ULIRMNNEG3S
<urn:uuid:e9138a72-6171-4dd0-97e5-5d3cf54a3351>
https://theexiledsoul.com/tag/albertomanguel/
response
<urn:uuid:24349d77-1a56-4b3f-8349-0ac7aa38fe4a>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2021-21
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for May 2021
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-67-67-101.ec2.internal
software: Apache Nutch 1.18 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.2-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: https://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/