A Reading Diary by Alberto ManguelFarrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004

A year in books, books re-read, musings on why certain stories resonate, theories on literature, on authors, on characters, wide-ranging references and quotations, lists, personal details of day-to-day living (travel, the weather, Manguel’s home in France). This book is a lovely hodge-podge of all of these things, and it makes me want to go read each of the books that Manguel writes about. Like A Year of Reading Proust except so much better, because Manguel comes across as charming, as real, as someone who moves in a privileged circle of artists and writers but isn’t at all shallow or interested in mere name-dropping.