This is more of a preview of a future post, but I just picked up a new book called With Borges by Alberto Manguel. It seems that Manguel, who’s now a famous writer-on-reading (I read The History of Reading some years back & enjoyed it, though I remember thinking it was somewhat Borges-lite), got his start as a teenager by reading books aloud to the blind Borges. This short memoir is his recounting of what it was like to be a bookish teenager, working in a national library, & then called in to read to an old man who, I can only imagine, must have seemed a bit like God…
Actually sounds like a story by Borges, come to think of it…
It does sound a lot like a Borges story. Talk about a dream coming true for someone. I wonder if Manguel put a Borges-esque last line in there.