intro a little condescending; conclusion a little conciliatory - unexpected shift. about "library" as collection of books. bad last line.

Let me begin with a warning: this book is not intended as a breezy, comforting, or normal read. It is, in essence, philosophical musings about the role of libraries in society in physical, cultural, personal, and even metaphysical senses.

[a:Alberto Manguel|3602|Alberto Manguel|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1227041892p2/3602.jpg] is an intellectual at heart, and this comes across clearly in his writing style and the content. I like to think of the book more as a collection of 14 essays exploring the idea of "library" in 14 different senses. There are a lot of books and authors referenced throughout which I was not able to understand or appreciate, but I didn't feel that my lack of knowledge kept me from appreciating the thought experiments presented in the book.

When someone asks me why I love books, or why I love libraries, this book is able to put all my reactions into text form.

Borges' protégé Alberto Manguel, who seems to specialize in writing about the literary experience, had impressed me with his History of Reading a few years ago, and now again with The Library at Night. This "history" of libraries and book collections is actually more of a meditation on the concept of libraries, both public and personal. What does our choice of books say about us? What does the way we classify those books? How do they live in our minds? Attention is even given to imaginary libraries, electronic media and the act of book burning. The library as everything. There isn't a page in this book that doesn't contain a fascinating fact, a lucid observation or a well-chosen quote. Man... I really have to get my shelves in order...

A unique and beautiful book. History, architecture, culture, emotion, with each chapter describing different facet of the role of libraries in the world at large and in our hearts.

3.5/5

Ultimately, the number of books always exceeds the space they are granted.

Alberto Manguel would be disturbed, if not outright horrified or disgusted, by my personal conception and execution of my library. The physical form is nothing more than a Ship of Theseus, alphabetically sorted by author surname and piled up wherever they happen to fit, equipped with a varying number of pairs of teeth depending on the number of books I am concurrently methodically whittling down at any given moment of time. The electronic form is a gladiatorial arena where books, ages spanning the length of five millennia, have been systematically pitted against one another for nearly a decade, leaving an ever lengthening record of triumphs and defeats that are much more centered around my, the reader's, thoughts than those of any of the works, however lauded or 'canonical.' You see, my physical library is currently nothing more than a trial run, a terminal where many faces of various levels of repute, popularity, and infamy have and will continue to pass in front of my reading gaze, leaving nothing behind but a brief digital overview of my own thoughts and, if the copy contained such, any objects previously entombed between the leafs. This copy of Manguel's will be sold off like most of the rest, and if I had, at the beginning of my read, extracted anything of interest from between its pages, I no longer remember the specifics.

As late as 1832, Thomas Carlyle was angrily asking, "Why is there not a Majesty's library in every county town? There is a Majesty's jail and gallows in every one!"


"Distrust those cosmopolitans who seek in the depths of their books the duties they scorn to perform at home. This kind of philosopher professes love for the Tartars, in order to be excused from loving his neighbors."

-Jean Jacques Rousseau

A long winded advanced reader copy epistle, a sleek strip of soothing silk, an AbeBook's inventory printout, a yellowed course change request from 1982, a slip containing nothing more than 'A---8131' and what may be a single letter signature below, an advertisement for a medical internship, a postcard of a Japanese publishing house made out to an address that no longer houses it, check out slips, purchase receipts, a number of used bookstores that I'd like to visit should they still exist when I get around to doing such, and my personally esteemed prize: a laminated row of four stamps displaying exquisite renderings of painted ceramics, linguistic details inscribed along the borders in what I imagine to be Polish. This collection will go much more lightly with me than will my plethora of treebooks, and, unlike the vast majority of those, will be kept for safekeeping when their previous places of residences are summarily traded in for some small amount of cash. I couldn't even tell you which works gave up which goods, and while most of these singular bits and bobs would be easily inscribed with some notifying detail, therein runs the risk of a beautifully archaic piece being labeled with a less than gratifying title, all so that I could remind my memory of trivia it has no interest in. I can barely remember the origin of maybe 2% of my current library's contents, and only when it was an especially good deal at my absolutely favorite book store or my absolutely favorite book sale. Determining more requires resorting to my digital logs, something that I'm sure Manguel would politely accept in speech and secretly disdain in mind, but if he has a method of recalling the entirety of choice pieces he drew from an unabridged reading of [b:Three Kingdoms|158770|Three Kingdoms (4-Volume Boxed Set)|Luo Guanzhong|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1519909801l/158770._SY75_.jpg|72711304] when it comes time for the final commentary that can keep up with my reading pace, I'd love to hear it.

[N]o library is what it is set up to be, and a library's fate is often decided not by those who created it for its merits but by those who wish to destroy it for its supposed faults.

We alone, and not our technologies, are responsible for our losses, and we alone are to blame when we deliberately choose oblivion over reflection.

Having nearly finished my official training as a librarian born and bred in the digital age, I find Manguel's pronouncements wavering between praiseworthy ideals, naive proclamations, and elitist nonsense. I learned something new about the libraries of pre-America America, and I was gratified by the dues given to ancient China and the Golden Age of Islam, however bogged down it became by Manguel's version of 'the white man's' burden near the end. The determination to destroy older works once they have been digitized, the delineation of a library's duties based on the Powers That Be, the destruction of written works from the time of white colonial settler states still sprawling into today to the Shoah whose history has been curiously uncoupled from that of Antifa in this 'enlightened' day and age : all of that is just as capitalistically and politically brutalized as much as are the myriad Carnegie Libraries, and to contextualize the latter without delving into the former is inconsistent at best and hypocritical otherwise. Unlike many an armchair critic, my ability to put food on the table will largely (if things go according to plan) hinge on my professional engagement with librarianship, and I am not in the position of any Borges who invites his friends to tea and crumpets while leaving the real work to obscure and beleaguered underlings. I act under little pretensions of who needs libraries in these days where nearly every other place of existence is monetized and the most popular workshops involve the writing of resumés, the navigation of housing markets, the tutoring for standardized tests, and the teaching of English, all held alongside information sessions ranging from legal help to domestic violence. Libraries should just be replaced by Amazon bookstores, say the people with roofs over their heads and trust funds in their bellies. In short, libraries in the US have been the target of a war of attrition for a long, long time, and Manguel's tirade on the Internet and co. has been rolled out so many a tired time that I hope he's changed his tune by now, as I'd hate to mark an author as irrelevant while they were still among the living.

[T]he housekeeper fears the power of the books she refuses to open.

I liked the beginning and the end of this work the best, as the work took a step back from its enamorment with the ideologies of works such as [b:Ex Libris|46890|Ex Libris Confessions of a Common Reader|Anne Fadiman|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1435782351l/46890._SY75_.jpg|1468318] and focused more on spirit rather than on structure. There's a list of Manguel's personally recommended works at the back that has already been transcribed into a more interactable online form, and I'll be taking it with a grain of salt as I do all compilations with some esteem to their names these days. My library is a bulbous thing that regularly undergoes many random additions and many ruthless excisions, and its final form, likely to remain heavy conjecture for some years into the future, numbers anywhere between less than sixty to more than two hundred works in quantity, depending on fortune's favor and aspects comparatively more within my control. I don't see myself ever having the means to completely restore an aged structure in a foreign land and form the library into a near exact match to my aesthetic preferences; even if I had the money for such, I'd choose an abode based on principles completely unrelated to literature and fit the books wherever's convenient. In reading, I am one of those boring persons who starts at the beginning of a physical work and moves to the end; prefers to read at a practically appointed time in the morning when the sun's angle is best conducive for such; and crams bed, desk, and books and reading space into a single room out of necessity. One day, I think I would like to have separate shelves devoted to works already read, works waiting their fair share, works in translation organized by language, works of nonfiction arranged by subject, monumentally sized epics, novellas, poetry, graphic novels, and maybe even something color coded. On the other hand, do I really care enough to sacrifice my relative ease in finally retrieving a copy for purposes of fulfilling its long awaited perusal, just because such a course of action was recommended to me by a handful of aged hipsters? As is the case of my reading appetites, the result will be a mix of outside influence and my own stubbornness, and the only guarantee is, in the process, I am sure to come across some extremely good reading.

Those who read, those who
tell us what they read,
Those who noisily turn
the pages of their books,
Those who have power over
red and black ink,
and over pictures,
Those are the ones who lead us,
guide us, show us the way.

-Aztec Codex, 1524

I liked this one, though it was little philosophical for my taste. Doesn't help that my brain is being fried at work and it's hard to read anything for pleasure right now. Reminds me of how much I love reading, though, and how special and unique a reader's relationship with each book is.

Manguel explores different facets of libraries such as shape (how different library shapes influence a reader), power, imagination, and identity. There was lots of history, references to other books, and a few personal stories (his library sounds divine, btw).

- My books hold between their covers every story I've ever known and still remember, or have now forgotte, or may one day read; they fill the space around me with ancient and new voices.
- More than anything, memory resembles a library in alphabetical disorder, and with no collected works by anyone.
- Each reader is but one chapter in life of a book, and unless he passes his knowledge on to others, it is as if he condemned the book to be buried alive.
- Lys ce que voudra (read as you please)

A beautiful reflection on what books and libraries have meant to us over the ages. Written with such sweet passion for the love of books, I do believe that Alberto Manguel is a kindred spirit (even if I do prefer the act of reading slightly more to the possession of books).

Containing fascinating stories from history as well as personal anecdotes, The Library at Night is charming and simple while still containing heavy thoughtful themes, such as why do we think the written word is immortal? I've been left with some thoughts to chew on.

A great book about all the different meanings a library has, this book is better suited to occasional perusal rather than reading straight through. An erudite offering that might be good as a gift for a book lover.

Made it through 30 or so pages and decided to just give up with this sentence: Therefore, as well as being an emblem of man's power to act through thought, the Library became a monument intended to defeat death, which, as poets tell us, puts an end to memory.

I am neither smart nor patient enough to try and read more of this pretentious book.

Interesting stories about the role of libraries throughout time and in different cultures, investigating why we have libraries, what private and public libraries say about us, and what we expect to gain from them. This book begins with and then tries to answer the following question: Why do we "continue to assemble whatever scraps of information we can gather in scrolls and books and computer chips, on shelf after library shelf, whether material, virtual or otherwise, pathetically intent on lending the world a semblance of sense and order, while knowing perfectly well that, however much we'd like to believe the contrary, our pursuits are sadly doomed to failure?" If you love books, you'll find the answers thought provoking and comforting. You may also walk away with a long list of books to add to your own library! I don't think I've ever come across someone as widely read as Alberto Manguel. I'm now looking forward to reading The Dictionary of Imaginary Places and A History of Reading.