Daniel Pennac’s The Rights of the Reader, in a seamless translation from French and wittily illustrated by Quentin Blake, is a humorous yet serious attack on the negative effects of institutional (mis)education, which condemns kids to a hatred for books. Altogether, this is a wonderful book, packed with fascinating anecdotes and reflections – and beautifully illustrated. The opening chapter, ‘The Last Page’, is a highly evocative account of the author’s own reading history. A History of Reading ranges over the physical shapes of books, the places people have read in and how, the power of scribes, the role of libraries, censorship, the author as public reader, the translator as reader, and much more. Virtually all aspects of the history of reading are covered: how it moved from reading aloud to silent reading, from the elite to the masses, from orality to text, from scholastic to individual, from literal to allegorical/interpretative. He deploys an impressively encyclopaedic knowledge with elegant eloquence. I will discuss five non-fiction books, one memoir and two novels, all of which have reading as a central theme.Īlberto Manguel’s monumental A History of Reading is a must for anyone interested in how reading evolved. Given that this series of articles is about the kinds of reading teachers can do outside their professional interests, it seems appropriate to review a few titles which touch on the nature of reading itself. Alan Maley has some suggestions for reading about reading.
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