A History of Reading

" 'Reading,' wrote Petrarch in one of his many letters, 'rarely avoids danger, unless the light of divine truth shines upon the reader, teaching what to seek and what to avoid.' This light (to follow Petrarch's image) shines differently on all of us, and differently also at the various stages of our lives. We never return to the same book or even to the same page, because in the varying light we change and the book changes, and our memories grow bright and dim and bright again, and we never know exactly what it is we learn and forget, and what it is we remember." --A History of Reading Alberto Manguel, 1996