The Library at Night

A guest post by Ron today:

We lost count at over seven thousand volumes. And there is less order than we'd like--I can't always put my hands on the book I want. Collected over thirty years, our library is a reflection of us--our thoughts, our interests, and our history. From the scholarly works of literature, history, and science to the beloved, crumbling, cheesy science fiction paperbacks to the rows and rows of books for children--our library occupies a place in my mind almost continuously. So when I received Alberto Manguel's The Library at Night as a birthday present, I knew I would have much in common with the author.

The Library at Night is a collection of essays on books and libraries framed by the construction and arrangement of his own library, 30,000 volumes collected over a lifetime and stored in a structure built using the ruins of a 15th century French barn. Immensely erudite, Manguel loves to tell stories and relate anecdotes as his essays meander along, twisting like a slow moving stream. He has a fund of quotations that never fail to please. It reminds me of being cornered at a party by a genial, funny, genuinely entertaining fellow--I imagine Orson Welles to be this way--but as you wait for the point, the anecdotes continue to flow, sometimes closer and sometimes further from the theme. Manguel's essays teeter and wobble along in this conversational style, but they always deliver at the end. They don't just peter out. In a strange literary roller coaster, I began each essay eagerly, swept along at the beginning. Then, as the twists and turns, the digressions and the asides, continue, I found myself looking ahead. "How much further?" I would think. "Just a few more pages." But somehow, at the end of each essay instead of putting the book down I would plunge into the next essay.

Manguel's essays are both intensely personal and scholarly as he ranges over 3000 years of the history of books and libraries. He moves surely from Callimachus to Diderot, from Avicenna to Melville Dewey. We read about the libraries at Alexandria and Pergamum, the libraries in Nazi concentration camps, and the imaginary libraries of Rabelais and Borges. Each essay, with titles like "The Library as Order," "The Library as Space," "The Library as Imagination," and "The Library as Power" illustrates another aspect of a library. And yet Manguel seldom lectures. Instead, each essay ends like an evening conversation with an entertaining (if well-educated) friend.

Occasionally he does preach a bit: his reaction to librarians is quite mixed, and he seldom fails to have an immoderate reaction. Like many book-lovers, he both admires and detests librarians and acts of librarianship. Once he refers to a librarian as a "dolt" and another time he calls some librarians "heroic", though in neither case were their actions all that doltish or heroic. I think he simply fails to understand the profession and the issues with which the profession is currently wrestling.

His understanding of technology is naive and what is worse, he doesn't realize it. For example, he dismisses the entire complicated and fascinating issue of electronic resources and digital preservation by saying that "[a]nybody who has used a computer knows how easy it is to lose a text on the screen". Nevertheless, he makes sharp and cogent observations about the Internet as a concept, suggesting that the web is "all surface and no volume, all present and no past." Or, "[i]f the Library at Alexandria was the emblem of our ambition of omniscience, the Web is the emblem of our ambition of omnipresence." I really like that: two human creations, separated by millennia, both striving for an aspect of Divinity.

Manguel concludes The Library at Night with a list of about 250 books that he describes as his "non-canonical list of favorite books," less than one percent of his massive collection. To my chagrin, I found I had read only about 50 books on his list, and in fact had not even heard of 96 of them. Perhaps I need to read three or four each year, just in case one day I find myself sitting in my library at night, sharing in a conversation with Alberto Manguel.

One percent of our books would be about 70. Could I come up with my own non-canonical list of favorites and limit it to 70? Can you?

Alberto Manguel's Non-Canonical List of Favorite Books

When Ron and I are looking for something to read, we're going to start using this list, because we've read fewer of the books on it than on any other list we've ever seen.

Aeschylus, The Orestaeia
Akhmatova, Anna, The Complete Poems
Albee Edward, A Delicate Balance
Andalusian Poems
Arciniegas, German, Biography of the Caribbean
Aries, Philippe, The Hour of Our Death
Asimov, Isaac, I, Robot
Atwood, Margaret, The Handmaid's Tale
Aubrey, John, Brief Lives
Auden, W.H., Collected Poems
Augustine, The Confessions
Barker, Pat, The Regeneration Trilogy
Baum, L. Frank, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
Beckett, Samuel, Happy Days
Beckford, William, Vathek
Biedma, Jaime Gil de, Longing: Selected Poems
Bioy Casares, Adolfo, The Dream of Heroes
Blake, Nicholas, The Beast Must Die
Blake, William, The Complete Poems
Bonnefoy, Yves, New and Selected Poems
Borges, Jorge Luis, Fictions
Bouvier, Nicholas, The Scorpion-Fish
Bradbury,Ray, The Martian Chronicles
Breton, Andre, Nadja
Brown, Sir Thomas, Urn Burial
Buchan, James, Frozen Desire: The History of Money
Bulgakov, Mikhail, The Master and Margarita
Bunyan, John, Pilgrim's Progress
Burgess, Anthony, A Clockwork Orange
Burroughs, William, Naked Lunch
Byron, George Gordon, Don Juan
Byron, Robert, The Road to Oxiana
Calasso, Roberto, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony
Calvino, Italo, If on a Winter's Night a Traveller
Camus, Albert, The Outsider
Carpentier, Alejo, Kingdom of This World
Carr, J.L. A Month in the Country
Carroll, Lewis, Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass
Carson, Anne, The Beauty of the Husband
Cary, Joyce, The Horse's Mouth
Catullus, The Complete Poems
Celan, Paul, Selected Poems and Prose
Celine, Louis Ferdinand, Voyage to the End of the Night
Cercas, Javier, Soldiers of Salamis
Cernuda, Luis, Selected Poems
Cervantes, Miguel de, Don Quixote
Chateaubriand, Francois Rene de, Memoirs from Beyond the Grave
Chesterton, G.K., The Man Who Was Thursday
Collodi, Carlo, The Adventures of Pinocchio
Conrad, Joseph, Victory
Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy
Denevi, Marco, Rose at Ten
Dickens, Charles, Our Mutual Friend
Dickson Carr, John, The Black Spectacles
Diderot, Denis, Jacques the Fatalist and His Master
Dinesen, Isak, Seven Gothic Tales
Doblin, Alfred, Berlin Alexanderplatz
Donne, John, The Complete Poetry and Selected Prose
Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan, The Hound of the Baskervilles
Eliot, T.S., Four Quartets
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, Essays
Fanon, Franz, The Wretched of the Earth
Faulkner, William, The Sound and the Fury
Findley, Timothy, The Wars
Fitzgerald, Penelope, The Blue Flower
Flaubert, Gustav, Bouvard and Pecuchet
Ford, Richard, Wildlife
Forster, E.M. A Passage to India
Fuentes Carlos, The Death of Artemio Cruz
Gallant, Mavis, From the Fifteenth District
Garcia Lorca, Federico, Poet in New York and The House of Bernarda Alba
Garner, Alan, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen
Genet, Jean, Our Lady of the Flowers
Gibbon, Edward, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
Gibson, William, Neuromancer
Goethe, J.W. von, Faust
Golding, William, Lord of the Flies
Gombrowicz, Witold, Ferdydurke
Gosse, Edmund, Father and Son
Grahame, Kenneth, The Wind in the Willows
Greene, Graham, The Power and the Glory
Grimm, Wilhelm and Jakob, Household Tales
Hawkes, John, Second Skin
Hedayat, Sadegh, The Blind Owl
Heine, Heinrich, Germany, A Fairy Tale
Hemingway, Ernest, The Old Man and the Sea
Hernandez, Miguel, Selected Poems
Hersey, John Hiroshima
Hsueh-Chin, Tsao, Dream of the Red Chamber
Huggan, Isabel, The Elizabeth Stories
Hughes, Robert, A High Wind in Jamaica
Ibn, Hazm, The Ring of the Dove
James, Henry, The Turn of the Screw
Joyce, James, Ulysses
Kadare, Ismail, The File on H.
Kafka, Franz, Diaries and the Trial
Kawabata, Yunishiro, the House of Sleeping Beauties
Kinglake, A.W., Eothen
Kipling, Rudyard, Kim
Labe, Louise, Complete Poetry and Prose
Lagerkvist, Par, The Dwarf
Lampedusa, Giuseppe di, The Leopard
Larkin, Phillip, Collected Poems
Las Casas, Bartolome de, A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies
Lawrence, D.H., Women in Love
Lazarillo of Tormes
Le Carre, John, The Spy Who Came In From the Cold
Le Guin, Ursula K., The Word for World is Forest
Lear, Edward, The Complete Nonsense Book
Lem, Stanislaw, Solaris
Lessing, Doris, Briefing for a Descent into Hell
Levi, Primo, The Periodic Table
Lopez, Barry, Arctic Dreams
Maalouf, Amin, The Crusades Through Arab Eyes
Machado de Assis, J.M., Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas
Magris, Claudio, The Danube
Malouf, David, An Imaginary Life
Mann, Thomas, The Magic Mountain
Marai, Sandor, Embers
Matthiessen, Peter, The Snow Leopard
Maugham, Somerset, Cakes and Ale
McEwan, Ian, Enduring Love
Melville, Herman, Moby-Dick
Menocal, Maria Rosa, The Ornament of the World
Miles, Rosalind, The Women's History of the World
Mishima, Yukio, The Sea of Fertility
Mistry, Rohinton, A Fine Balance
Montaigne, Michel de, The Essays
Moore, Brian, Cold Heaven
Morris, Jan, Venice
Munro, Alice, The Progress of Love
Nabokov, Vladimir, Pale Fire
Nooteboom, Cees, In the Mountains of the Netherlands
Novalis, Fragments
Nuwas, Abu, Diwan al gazal: Love Poems
O'Brien, Flann, The Third Policeman
O'Connor, Flannery, A Good Man Is Hard to Find
Orwell, George, 1984 and Down and Out in Paris and London
Outram, Richard, Selected Poems 1960-1980
Ovid, Metamorphosis
Oz, Amos, A Tale of Love and Darkness
Ozick, Cynthia, The Messiah of Stockholm
Pavese, Cesare, Disaffection: Complete Poems
Pessoa, Fernando, The Book of Disquiet
Petronius, Satyricon
Pirenne, Henri, Medieval Cities
Plato, Timaeus
Pliny the Younger, Letters
Plutarch, Parallel Lives
Pogue Harrison, Richard, The Dominion of the Dead
Pound Ezra, The Cantos
Powys, T.F. Mr. Weston's Good Wine
Prescott, William H., History of the Conquest of Mexico and Peru
Proust, Marcel, In Search of Lost Time
Purdy, James, The Nephew
Quevedo, Francisco de, Selected Poetry
Racine, Jean, Phedre
Rankin, Nicholas, Dead Man's Chest
Read, Herbert, The Green Child
Rendell, Ruth, A Judgement in Stone
Richler, Mordecai, Barney's Version
Rilke, Rainer Maria, The Selected Poetry of Rainier Maria Rilke
Rimbaud, Arthur, Complete Works
Rolfe, Frederick, Hadrian the Seventh
Roth, Joseph, The Radetzky March
Rulfo, Juan, Pedro Paramo
Saki, Short Stories
Salinger, J.D., The Catcher in the Rye
Saroyan, William, The Human Comedy
Schama, Simon, Citizens
Schulz, Bruno, Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass
Schwob, Marcel, Imaginary Lives
Sebald, W.G. Austerlitz
Shakespeare, William, King Lear
Shelley, Mary, Frankenstein
Simenon, Georges, The Wedding of Monsieur Hire
Skvorecky, Josef, The Engineer of Human Souls
Sophocles, Ajax and Antigone
Spark, Muriel, Memento Mori
St. John of the Cross, Collected Works
Steinbeck, John, The Grapes of Wrath
Steiner, George, After Babel
Stevenson, Robert Louis, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
Stone, I.F., The Trial of Socrates
Stoppard, Tom, The Invention of Love
Sturgeon, Theodore, More Than Human
Svevo, Italo, The Conscience of Zeno
Szabo, Magda, Katarina Street
Tabucchi, Antonio, Declares Pereira
Thomas, Dylan, The Poems
Thoreau, Henry David, Walden
The Thousand and One Nights
Toibin, Colm, The Master
Transtromer, Tomas, New Collected Poems
Trevor, William, Collected Stories
Tuchman, Barbara, A Distant Mirror
Tunstrom, Goran, The Christmas Oratorio
Tutuola, Amos, The Palm-Wine Drinkard
Twain, Mark, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Vargas Llosa, Mario, The Time of the Hero
Verlaine, Paul, One Hundred and One Poems
Verne, Jules, Journey to the Centre of the Earth
Warner, Marina, Alone of All Her Sex
Wells, H.G., The Island of Dr. Moreau
White, Patrick, Voss
Whitman, Walt, Leaves of Grass
Wilbur, Richard, Collected Poems
Wilde, Oscar, The Happy Prince and Other Stories and The Importance of Being Earnest
Williams, Tennessee, Suddenly, Last Summer
Yourcenar, Marguerite, Memoirs of Hadrian
Zola, Emile, L'Assomoir

You'll notice that Manguel's favorites are not always the best or most famous work by each author listed. For instance, while I agree that Don Juan is probably the best thing Byron ever wrote, it's not a widely accepted view, and Le Guin's The Word for World is Forest--although it won the Hugo--is not as well-known as her Earthsea Trilogy. Also, I can't imagine there are very many people who prefer Williams' Suddenly Last Summer to A Streetcar Named Desire.