{"id":8914,"date":"2021-03-16T07:52:39","date_gmt":"2021-03-16T11:52:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=8914"},"modified":"2021-04-05T13:33:16","modified_gmt":"2021-04-05T17:33:16","slug":"a-great-read-needs-a-great-reader","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=8914","title":{"rendered":"A Great Read Needs a Great Reader"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Having read several excellent thrillers set in Argentina in the last year, I was excited to see the interview with Alberto Manguel (Glimmer Train<\/em> #102). Born in Buenos Aires in 1948, Manguel lived in Israel and many other countries. Taking his love of reading to the huge scale, he was the director of the National Library of Argentina, but on an intimate scale, as a teenager he read out loud several times a week to the great Jorge Luis Borges as his eyesight was failing. Manguel (pictured) is now a Canadian citizen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Everyone who is a reader can admire the love of books that has propelled his career. His first book was put together when he was working for an Italian publishing company. He and his colleague Gianni Guadalupi wrote a travel guide to the cities, lands, and islands that live only in the imaginations of authors and their readers: Shangri-La, Oz, Wonderland, Middleearth and many others. His catholic reading led him to assemble more than twenty anthologies, for which the included authors are undoubtedly grateful. \u201cThe impulse was less of writing a book than publicizing what I had read,\u201d he said. Eventually, writing about what he had read became the non-fiction book A History of Reading<\/em> and many others.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Like most inveterate readers, he said, \u201cexperience came to me through stories. Books have always given me the words to name the things that happen. We all know that we can\u2019t see what we don\u2019t know is there.\u201d If imagination is a tool for survival, we tell stories in order to hone that tool and make us of it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI think our species has survived through having experiences without having to have the physical experience,\u201d he said. You can link up that thought to the repeated studies<\/a> showing that reading literary fiction helps builds people\u2019s empathy. (This finding does not apply to popular fiction, which often lacks characters who are \u201cnuanced, unpredictable, and difficult to understand\u201d\u2014you know, as in real life.).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Most of Manguel\u2019s books were written in English, which was his first language, followed by German. He didn\u2019t learn Spanish until he was eight. \u201cWhen I learned Spanish, I was introduced to another way of thinking. I\u2019ve always believed that languages dictate your thoughts and allow you to think certain things,\u201d and language studies bear out<\/a> his view.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Miguel continued: \u201cSpanish has a horror of the vacuum. You don\u2019t allow for silences. You fill the sentence with adjectives, adverbs, synonyms, and it\u2019s not disturbing. If you do that in English, you write purple prose.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What an interesting insight! It makes your fingers itch to sit at the computer and bang out an adjective-rich conversation. Here\u2019s Argentinian thriller-writer Sergio Olgu\u00edn\u2019s character Ver\u00f3nica Rosenthal describing her cousin\u2019s house: \u201cIt\u2019s hidden away behind a little wood on the hillside. A typical nineties construction, Californian style: huge windows, Italian furniture, BKF butterfly chairs (uncomfortable), and Michael Thonet rocking chair, which, if it isn\u2019t an original, certainly looks the part, a spectacular view (even from the toilets), a Jacuzzi in almost all the bathtubs, a sauna, a well-equipped gym, huge grounds (looking a bit sparse now that autumn\u2019s on its way), a heated swimming pool, a changing room, a gazebo which is in itself practically another house and lots, lots more.\u201d Whew! That passage is from Olgu\u00edn\u2019s new five-star book<\/a>, The Foreign Girls<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Having read several excellent thrillers set in Argentina in the last year, I was excited to see the interview with Alberto Manguel (Glimmer Train #102). Born in Buenos Aires in 1948, Manguel lived in Israel and many other countries. Taking … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"A Great Read Needs a Great Reader - Alberto Manguel has made a lovely career of reading books.","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[62,126],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8914","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-authors","category-reading-2"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-2jM","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8914","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8914"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8914\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8916,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8914\/revisions\/8916"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8914"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8914"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8914"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}