A Second Interview With Alberto Manguel

Recently I blogged about a great interview with Alberto Manguel. I had the good fortune two days later to run across a second interview with him. This one is an audio file; it was recorded shortly after A Reading Diary: A Year of Favourite Books was published, and it was this book that he came to talk about. However, the conversation was wide-ranging. He did talk about the diary: the concept of it, the historical use of it, the use of a diary to create ourselves, and the notion of reader as voyeur. However, he also talked about the idea of home, the reason his Canadian nationality is so important to him, and Canadian literature. Unsurprisingly, given his vast reading, he managed to mention (among others) Cynthia Ozick, Lewis Carroll, Oscar Wilde, Katherine Mansfield, and St. Augustine all in the space of a few minutes. Finally, he gives a brief reading from A Reading Diary. Interviewer Robert Gougeon interrupts him a little too often, but Manguel handles it graciously. This site has many other audio interviews with authors, including Gail Bowen, Ian Rankin, Lynn Coady, Neil Bissoondath, Michael Crummey, Tomson Highway, and Alexander McCall Smith.