Finished reading: Alberto Manguel's With Borges.

When I was in Seattle a few weeks ago, I went on a dad-sponsored bookstore shopping trip at Elliott Bay Books, and so far all the books we got there have been great. With Borges is Argentinian writer Alberto Manguel's memoir of going to read to blind National Librarian Jorge Luis Borges when he was a teenager. As everyone knows, I am obsessed with JLB (to the extent that I refer to him, rather impetuously, by his initials) so it just made sense for me to read this. Also, it is less than 100 pages long, the perfect length of book for the end of term. Go! Buy it! I imagine there is even a closer bookstore to you than Seattle. Unless you live in Seattle. In which case, go to Elliott Bay Books, by all means. It's wonderful-- the kind of bookstore I want to live in when I grow up.

"For Borges, the core of reality lay in books; reading books, writing books, talking about books. In a visceral way, he was conscious of continuing a dialogue begun thousands of years before and which he believed would never end. Books restored the past. 'In time,' he said to me, 'Every poem becomes an elegy.'" (31)