An evening with the delightful Mr. Manguel

Yesterday evening MUN's English department hosted a reading by Canadian/ Argentinian novelist, poet, athologist, raconteur and generally freakishly-well-read guy Alberto Manguel. He read from his latest book, A Reader's Diary, which has a pretty cool concept: he took a year to re-read twelve of his favourite books, one for each month, and keep a diary of his reading experience.

I had been asked beforehand to be one of the faculty members to accompany him out for drinks afterward, which of course I agreed to readily (the chair said he wanted "young and energetic" faculty to entertain our distinguished guest; to which I responded, "Well, I'm young ..."). And I have to say: Mr. Manguel (Alberto to his friends) is charming, gracious, and utterly unpretentious -- something rather unusual in the CanLit world, in my experience. This is doubly impressive when one considers his credentials: a speaker of something in the area of five languages, vastly well-read, author of numerous essays, novels, scholarly books, and a noted anthologist. Also, he spent two years as the personal secretary of Jorge Luis Borges! I have now achieved one degree of separation from the master. Conversation with him was akin to what I imagine meeting Umberto Eco would be like, only without the terror and crippling sense of intellectual inferiority. To speak to Alberto Manguel was to be in awe of his erudition, but he is so gracious, and so interested in what everyone else has to say, that one feels very comfortable and at home with him.

(An aside, to my Alternative Realities students: I mentioned that class to him apropos of the Borges we studied, and he ended up grilling me for about fifteen minutes about the material on that course. As it turns out, he's quite the fan of Dark City).

I told him, as we sat down to our drinks at the Fairmont hotel bar (Mom, Dad -- our server was Georgina!), that throughout his reading I kept making lists in my mindof what my twelve books would be ... he responded that he wished I'd mentioned them in the question period -- that he'd been hoping the audience would share their own life-changing reads. It was at this point that I realized I was in the presence of a pretty singular guy: never in my encounters with various Canadian literatti have I met someone so interested to hear what other people thought on a subject. So we went around the table for a while as everyone shared their own selections.

And so once again in this blog we come back to reading lists. This morning as I had my coffee, I tried to make my definitive list, insofar as that's possible. My criteria weren't quite the same as Mr. Manguel's -- his reader's diary looks back over a life of reading; I don't feel I have nearly the experience to do the same. I settled on twelve books that have changed my life in one capacity or the other. And as before, I look forward to reading other people's lists in the comments, in whole or in part ...

And unlike previous lists, these are in order -- chronological, that is.

1. J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings
2. Homer, The Illiad
3. James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
4. Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
5. Thomas Mann, Death in Venice and Other Stories
6. Northrop Frye, The Anatomy of Criticism
7. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Love in the Time of Cholera
8. Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
9. W.B. Yeats, Michael Robartes and the Dancer
10. Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths
11. Noam Chomsky, Necessary Illusions
12. Arthur Koestler, The Sleepwalkers

Understand, these are books that, at the time, made a huge impact ... not all of them still have the same effect today (for example, Joyce's Portrait was, appropriately, an epiphany when I read it ... now Stephen Dedalus just pisses me off). But for the most part, they are books that still resonate for me.


And in closing: gratuitous Wilde quotation for Eano! "But what is the difference between literature and journalism? ... Journalism is unreadable and literature is not read. That is all."