Un laberinto propio

What is this book?

A first way of answering this question would be to tell you that it is a combination of the following elements:

1. An organised sequence — even if at times it may not look like one — of ideas about how reading affects our lives for the better.
2. Suggestions of books that might interest you, and invitations to explore music, places and experiences.
3. And a personal itinerary in the form of a labyrinth, in which the autobiographical is interwoven with books, cities, music, authors and memories.

And yet I have the feeling that these three points simplify the description of this book to such a degree that they could be misleading. So let me put it another way, with more nuance, in the paragraphs that follow.

This book could be defined as a light essay on reading, accompanied by biographical episodes, anecdotes from the world of books and literature, and conversations with some of the most important thinkers on the benefits of reading, as well as scholars of the publishing sector. All of this is interwoven with somewhat more literary passages and with connections between reading and certain moments of my life — or of other people’s — that help to illuminate the book’s thesis.

My aim is that in these pages you will find arguments, and the odd suggestive piece of evidence, to persuade you — among other things — that reading is the most powerful tool ever created by Homo sapiens; that it is a human technology combining effort and pleasure; that it is an activity that can lengthen life and improve its quality; that when you read a text you become an artist, because you build in your brain a unique interpretation of that book; that ambitious reading strengthens analytical thinking and, with it, democratic coexistence; that the digital world is a consequence of reading and can become an opportunity or a threat, depending on how intelligent the strategies we deploy turn out to be; and that reading is also a conversation, a way of linking ideas — and that this web of connections is the fundamental key to human creativity.

I have already said that this is a light essay, and it is worth insisting: it is not an academic or scientific work. It is more literary than technical, more ironic than rigorous and — or so I hope — more entertaining than systematic. There may be the odd denser passage, but I believe these amount to brief stretches of the book.

If this text asks anything of you, it is that you play — that you accept the invitation so that we can play together. That you enter this labyrinth with a curiosity like the one you would bring to wandering a new city, and that you make it a labyrinth of your own. That you read these digressions as one lets oneself be led down a forest path that suddenly opens onto a discovery. In short: that when the journey is over, your own connections should be worth more than mine.

So the first thing these pages offer you is a set of arguments to persuade you that reading changes our lives, and sometimes makes us who we are.

Secondly, they invite you to explore very different books: poems, novels, essays, treatises that may manage to stir your curiosity.

Thirdly, I wanted to hand you a score: a map of ideas, experiences and books that only acquires a unique meaning when you perform it. Imagine it as a symphony that advances with its own changes of tempo: from a ridiculous anecdote to an unexpected revelation about a new dimension of reading; from walks through Venice, London or Rome to the books that teach us to decipher that same labyrinth; from the curious relationship between the invention of bottle-making machines and the act of reading, or the echo of a piece of music that suggests an itinerary; or from the way family shapes our relationship with reading at the root, to the evidence that a good teacher — or a commitment to a strong education system — can offset the inequalities that arise from childhood onwards. This journey may look more like a fluke than a plan, but it was really conceived as a billiards strategy.

One play, for instance, may begin with a first ball set rolling by an almost innocent gesture: the memory of a teenage infatuation with an Italian girl during a holiday in England. That ball runs on and grazes another — the one in which that boy suddenly identifies with Dante Alighieri when, back home, a teacher presented a sonnet from the Vita nuova in class. That ball in turn drives a third: the Ljubljana Manifesto in defence of ambitious reading, and the conversation with its author about the first books we read in our lives. The movement continues and touches one ball more — the one about how what is read to you in childhood shapes the way you perceive places, and about neural plasticity. That ball, in its turn, nudges another, linking that malleability to wanderings through a wooded labyrinth and the readings that go with them. And, in a final stroke of luck or clumsiness, the whole chain ends by pocketing one last ball, devoted to getting lost in a Venetian labyrinth.

Fourthly, I have drawn on the twenty-five years I have spent working in the world of reading to weave in a good number of autobiographical notes — personal anecdotes from childhood and adulthood, ridiculous situations and other curious episodes. The book opens, in fact, with a few passages rescued from a notebook of personal diary entries.

So let us begin with that: with the morning Inés came down to breakfast with her parents…