Alberto Manguel has written more books about books and reading and libraries than anyone else that I have ever read. Some of my favourites have been [b:A History Of Reading|1329252|A History Of Reading|Alberto Manguel|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1182790346s/1329252.jpg|1334214] and [b:Homer's the Iliad and the Odyssey: A Biography|1579091|Homer's the Iliad and the Odyssey A Biography|Alberto Manguel|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1328774640s/1579091.jpg|2920312] (both pre-GR reading but due for rereads soon I think). His newest "Packing My Library" is structured around the act of having his 35,000 volume library in France being packed up for storage when he was set to move to the US and then instead became diverted to become the Director of the National Library of Argentina, his birth country.

The main arc of the packing and moving tale is interrupted by 10 digressions in which Manguel ponders libraries in general and the purpose and goals of a National Library in particular. Bibliophiles will love it.

Trivia Link
35,000 books in a personal library is a bit hard to picture and I haven't found a video of Manguel's French barn library, but in the meantime, here is a video of [a:Umberto Eco|1730|Umberto Eco|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1455915753p2/1730.jpg] walking through his apartment home library of 30,o00 volumes at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UoEuvgT1wBs

Manguel, whose "A History of Reading" I loved, admits that he has a bad habit of digressing during his essays, and that happens here quite a bit - to the point that I am not sure the title makes sense for the book itself.
For a collection of short, personal essays, there seems to be a wall he sets up between himself and the reader - an unwillingness to share all of himself. For example, he swipes aside the reason he and his partner had to leave the home they loved in France.
He covers the inability of language to reflect Reality, how unreliable the alphabet and words are - subjects he and many others, have covered in depth elsewhere. He is obviously erudite in a very Old School kind of way (and I would even call his writing style, and the composition of his sentences to be very Old School - he does remind me of R L Stevenson, without the casualness), and I found his stories of Jewish theology informative. And, the last 3 chapters, on being Director of the National Library of Argentina, and what role that Library should assume in the modern world, for the country as a whole, and for readers and non-readers, had some interesting questions. Not surprisingly, most without answers (they mostly are an ongoing dialog for every other national library as well).
OK, OK, he read to a blind Borges as a boy. Reminder, that 2 Stars is "It was OK".
This short tome interested me when I first saw it on a New Titles table, but I put it down at the bookstore. Then read a review, with other books also covered, and had a quick, strong interest in it. I bought it as an ebook that day, and started reading it that night. Sadly, it never really grabbed/engaged me.

Repetitive, belaboured, superficial, vague and disorganized. It's not really clear to me how this ever got published.

Though I liked parts of it, Packing my Library tries too hard to create the illusion of a structure when Manguel’s idiosyncratic narrative begs to be left elliptical and fragmented. The back and forth between the “elegy” and “digression” is a distracting distinction at best and otherwise frustrating, as you’re given a framework that creates certain expectations in the reader (which I wish I would have been free of). The shift between these two “modes” is arbitrary and both sections read the same way—the meandering thoughts, sometimes poignant and sometimes precious, of a well-read and vaguely privileged bibliophile. Then again, something tells me that this book might suit the palate of readers familiar with the rest of Manguel’s work, as it might fit more uniquely within the context of his other titles.

Also (perhaps it was a mix of the title, the heft of the word “elegy,” the marketing materials, and the way the book opens) but I expected there to be more... plot? memoir? lived experience? For example: What is the big catalyst for packing up the library and Manguel and his partner having to reluctantly leave their estate in a quaint hamlet in France, where his many thousands of books are stored in a romantically refurbished stone barn? (I honestly imagined the library from The Beauty and the Beast). These are all some of the first details we get, and it paints quite the picture. Yet this glamorous tension is flippantly dispelled in two sentences somewhere between the second and third digression: “I needn’t dwell on how it came to pass... for reasons I don’t wish to recall because they belong to the realm of sordid bureaucracy.” Um. Okay, I guess. Onto the musings of the mind with a near disregard for things like “money,” for example. The rallying cry towards the end of the book about how literature is about justice and how regimes fall but literature remains etc. rings hollow since these discussions about literacy and the importance of reading fail to grapple with (or even acknowledge) the lived realities of race, class, access, colonialism, and other related intersections. In other words, sordid bureaucracy.

Perhaps these issues are beyond the scope of this slim meditation and this was the wrong book for me to start with, considering Miguel’s catalogue. But I felt set-up to expect something more nuanced. Another reviewer (Lobstergirl) put it this way: "I have to wean myself off this self-indulgent genre - bookish people Talking About Their Books, and all the supraliterary digressions Their Books conjure up. Already in the first chapter - the "elegy" - I felt resentful of the author luxuriating in a deep tub of his albertomanguelness. It takes a unique writer to pull off this genre. Manguel isn’t."

Please check out my review in my blog.

https://polymathtobe.blogspot.com/2023/03/book-review-packing-my-library-by.html

This book is crap. It’s nonlinear and not by subject. Its boring. And at a point I thought do I even know what’s going on, no.

Maybe it would be more meaningful if I knew the author, but I don’t and thus do not care about his maid getting books for his father and rebounding them in green...

This is by no means a bad book or a boring book, it just isn't the book that I was expecting or wanting to read.

I very much enjoyed and appreciated Manguel's certainty in libraries—both personal and public—and his absolute love of literature, and I loved when he detailed his own sense of calm and belonging within his home library. Unfortunately though, these parts were too heavily interspersed with tangents (digressions) that often weren't the least bit relevant or interesting to me, and he spent an inordinate amount of time referencing people I either am only vaguely familiar with or have fully never heard of before. Therefore, unfortunately, this book was not as much for me as I had hoped.

I would still encourage those who love libraries and take enormous comfort in physical books to give this a go, though—especially if you happen to have a degree in Literature!

Notes:
I think "library," and I'm immediately struck by the paradox that a library undermines whatever order it might possess...

Anarchy under the appearance of order

...because we don't really possess them: books possess us.

To what success can an artist aspire? How can a writer achieve his purpose when all he has at his disposal is the imperfect tool of language? And above all: What is created when an artist sets out to create? Does a new, forbidden world come into being or is a dark mirror of this world lifted up for us to gaze it? Is a work of art a lasting reality or an imperfect lie?

Inexpressible epiphany

Our creations, our Golems or our libraries, are at best things that suggest an approximation to a copy of our blurry intuition of the real thing, itself an imperfect imitation of an ineffable archetype.

library = to set up something that aspires to an order, an imperfect dream of order

"Since life is a voyage or a battle, every story is either the Iliad or the Odyssey."