Download or read book The Library at Night written by Alberto Manguel and published by Vintage Canada. This book was released on 2011-07-27 with total page 355 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the tradition of A History of Reading, this book is an account of Manguel’s astonishment at the variety, beauty and persistence of our efforts to shape the world and our lives, most notably through something almost as old as reading itself: libraries. The Library at Night begins with the design and construction of Alberto Manguel’s own library at his house in western France – a process that raises puzzling questions about his past and his reading habits, as well as broader ones about the nature of categories, catalogues, architecture and identity. Thematically organized and beautifully illustrated, this book considers libraries as treasure troves and architectural spaces; it looks on them as autobiographies of their owners and as statements of national identity. It examines small personal libraries and libraries that started as philanthropic ventures, and analyzes the unending promise – and defects – of virtual ones. It compares different methods of categorization (and what they imply) and libraries that have built up by chance as opposed to by conscious direction. In part this is because this is about the library at night, not during the day: this book takes in what happens after the lights go out, when the world is sleeping, when books become the rightful owners of the library and the reader is the interloper. Then all daytime order is upended: one book calls to another across the shelves, and new alliances are created across time and space. And so, as well as the best design for a reading room and the makeup of Robinson Crusoe’s library, this book dwells on more "nocturnal" subjects: fictional libraries like those carried by Count Dracula and Frankenstein’s monster; shadow libraries of lost and censored books; imaginary libraries of books not yet written. The Library at Night is a fascinating voyage through the mind of one our most beloved men of letters. It is an invitation into his memory and vast knowledge of books and civilizations, and throughout – though mostly implicitly – it is also a passionate defence of literacy, of the unique pleasures of reading, of the importance of the book. As much as anything else, The Library at Night reminds us of what a library stands for: the possibility of illumination, of a better path for our society and for us as individuals. That hope too, at the close, is replaced by something that fits this personal and eclectic book even better: something more fragile, and evanescent than illumination, though just as important.
Download or read book The Midnight Library A GMA Book Club Pick written by Matt Haig and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2023-05-09 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The #1 New York Times bestselling WORLDWIDE phenomenon Winner of the Goodreads Choice Award for Fiction | A Good Morning America Book Club Pick | Independent (London) Ten Best Books of the Year "A feel-good book guaranteed to lift your spirits."—The Washington Post The dazzling reader-favorite about the choices that go into a life well lived, from the acclaimed author of How To Stop Time and The Comfort Book. Don’t miss Matt Haig’s latest instant New York Times besteller, The Life Impossible, available now Somewhere out beyond the edge of the universe there is a library that contains an infinite number of books, each one the story of another reality. One tells the story of your life as it is, along with another book for the other life you could have lived if you had made a different choice at any point in your life. While we all wonder how our lives might have been, what if you had the chance to go to the library and see for yourself? Would any of these other lives truly be better? In The Midnight Library, Matt Haig's enchanting blockbuster novel, Nora Seed finds herself faced with this decision. Faced with the possibility of changing her life for a new one, following a different career, undoing old breakups, realizing her dreams of becoming a glaciologist; she must search within herself as she travels through the Midnight Library to decide what is truly fulfilling in life, and what makes it worth living in the first place.
Download or read book Good Night Library written by Denise Brennan-Nelson and published by Sleeping Bear Press. This book was released on 2019-03-15 with total page 36 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Even the library has to sleep! This calming bedtime story says good night to the library and all the fun it holds--from books and story time to computers and comics. A charming ode to everyone's favorite community space and a perfect good night for budding book lovers.
Download or read book The Night Library written by David Zeltser and published by Random House Studio. This book was released on 2019-04-02 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Polar Express meets The Night at the Museum in this fantastical picture-book adventure about the magic of books and libraries, perfect for book lovers of all ages! After a young boy goes to sleep upset that he's getting a book for his birthday, he's visited in the night by Patience and Fortitude, the two stone lions who guard the New York Public Library. Soon, he's magically whisked away from his cozy home in the Bronx, and the two mighty lions show him the wonder of the library. There, the inquisitive Latino boy discovers the power of books and their role not only in his own life, but also in the lives of the people he loves. Raul Colon's gorgeous, rich art creates an immersive world in this book about books, which is sure to capture the imaginations of kids and adults and inspire them to grab their library cards and dive into the worlds of stories.
Download or read book The Night World written by Mordicai Gerstein and published by Little, Brown Books for Young Readers. This book was released on 2015-06-16 with total page 41 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A beautiful story about the secrets of nighttime and the beauty of dawn from Caldecott Medal-winning illustrator, Mordicai Gerstein. Includes Read-Aloud/Read-to-Me functionality, where available. Book Description:One night, a little boy is awoken by his cat, Sylvie. Everyone in the house is sleeping, but outside, the Night World is wide awake! Beginning with a beautiful black-and-white palette, the shadows of the Night World come to life: lilies, sunflowers, rabbits, deer, and owls are all revealed as Sylvie and the boy explore the world outside his door. But the animals all know something new is coming--what could it be? Finally, in an explosion of color, the dawn arrives.
Download or read book The City of Words written by Alberto Manguel and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2008 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'And yet stories, even the best and truest, can't save us from our own folly. Stories can't protect us from suffering and error, from natural and artificial catastrophes, from our own suicidal greed. The only thing they can do is ... offer consolation for suffering and words to name our experience. Stories can tell us who we are ... and suggest ways of imagining a future that, without calling for comfortable happy endings, may offer us ways of remaining alive, together, on this much-abused earth.' Based on Canada's 2007 CBC Massey Lectures (to be broadcast in Australia by ABC Radio National in April 2008), Alberto Manguel's The City of Words takes a fresh look at the rise of violent intolerance in our societies. We strive to build societies with sets of values all citizens can agree on. But something has gone wrong- race riots in France, political murder in the Netherlands, bombings in Britain and Bali - are these symptoms of a multicultural experiment gone awry? Why is it so difficult for us to live together when the alternatives are demonstrably horrifying? With his trademark wit and erudition, Alberto Manguel suggests a fresh approach- we should look at what visionaries, poets, novelists, essayists and filmmakers have to say about building societies. Perhaps the stories we tell hold secret keys to the human heart. From Cassandra to Jack London, the Epic of Gilgamesh to the computer Hal in 2001- A Space Odyssey, Don Quixote to Atanarjuat- The Fast Runner, Manguel draws fascinating and revelatory parallels between the personal and political realities of our present-day world and those of myth, legend and story.
Download or read book Quartet in Autumn written by Barbara Pym and published by Pan Macmillan. This book was released on 2015-10-08 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With an introduction by Alexander McCall Smith, author of The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series. One did not drink sherry before the evening, just as one did not read a novel in the morning. In 1970s London, Edwin, Norman, Letty and Marcia work in the same office and suffer the same problem – loneliness. Lovingly and with delightful humour, Barbara Pym conducts us through their day-to-day existence: their preoccupations, their irritations, their judgements, and – perhaps most keenly felt – their worries about having somehow missed out on life as post-war Britain shifted around them. Deliciously, blackly funny and full of obstinate optimism, Quartet in Autumn shows Barbara Pym's sensitive artistry at its most sparkling. Its world is both extraordinary and familiar, revealing the eccentricities of everyday life.
Download or read book The Library Book written by Susan Orlean and published by Simon & Schuster. This book was released on 2019-10-01 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Susan Orlean’s bestseller and New York Times Notable Book is “a sheer delight…as rich in insight and as varied as the treasures contained on the shelves in any local library” (USA TODAY)—a dazzling love letter to a beloved institution and an investigation into one of its greatest mysteries. “Everybody who loves books should check out The Library Book” (The Washington Post). On the morning of April 28, 1986, a fire alarm sounded in the Los Angeles Public Library. The fire was disastrous: it reached two thousand degrees and burned for more than seven hours. By the time it was extinguished, it had consumed four hundred thousand books and damaged seven hundred thousand more. Investigators descended on the scene, but more than thirty years later, the mystery remains: Did someone purposefully set fire to the library—and if so, who? Weaving her lifelong love of books and reading into an investigation of the fire, award-winning New Yorker reporter and New York Times bestselling author Susan Orlean delivers a “delightful…reflection on the past, present, and future of libraries in America” (New York magazine) that manages to tell the broader story of libraries and librarians in a way that has never been done before. In the “exquisitely written, consistently entertaining” (The New York Times) The Library Book, Orlean chronicles the LAPL fire and its aftermath to showcase the larger, crucial role that libraries play in our lives; delves into the evolution of libraries; brings each department of the library to vivid life; studies arson and attempts to burn a copy of a book herself; and reexamines the case of Harry Peak, the blond-haired actor long suspected of setting fire to the LAPL more than thirty years ago. “A book lover’s dream…an ambitiously researched, elegantly written book that serves as a portal into a place of history, drama, culture, and stories” (Star Tribune, Minneapolis), Susan Orlean’s thrilling journey through the stacks reveals how these beloved institutions provide much more than just books—and why they remain an essential part of the heart, mind, and soul of our country.
Download or read book Unexpected Night written by Elizabeth Daly and published by Wildside Press LLC. This book was released on 2021-08-13 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New York handwriting and rare book expert—and a gentleman sleuth—Henry Gamadge is vacationing in coastal Maine when the police there need his help. It’s a strange case involving a seemingly natural death, a large inheritance, a mysterious nighttime rendezvous, and a troupe of summer stock actors who start dying off. Something is clearly afoot, but nothing quite seems to fit. With an eye for frauds, Gamadge is just what the local detective needs to throw the book at a killer...
Download or read book Noisy Night written by Mac Barnett and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2017-03-07 with total page 34 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A clever picture book about a multi-level apartment building's occupants and their many nighttime noises"--
Download or read book Target in the Night written by Ricardo Piglia and published by Deep Vellum Publishing. This book was released on 2015-10-19 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Ricardo Piglia may be the best Latin American writer to have appeared since the heyday of Gabriel García Márquez."—Kirkus Reviews A passionate political and psychological thriller set in a remote Argentinean Pampas town, Target in the Night is an intense and tragic family history reminiscent of King Lear, in which the madness of the detective is integral to solving crimes. Target in the Night, a masterpiece, won every major literary prize in the Spanish language in 2011. Ricardo Piglia (b. 1941), widely considered the greatest living Argentine novelist, has taught for decades in American universities, including most recently at Princeton.
Download or read book A Reader on Reading written by Alberto Manguel and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2010-03-02 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this major collection of his essays, Alberto Manguel, whom George Steiner has called “the Casanova of reading,” argues that the activity of reading, in its broadest sense, defines our species. “We come into the world intent on finding narrative in everything,” writes Manguel, “landscape, the skies, the faces of others, the images and words that our species create.” Reading our own lives and those of others, reading the societies we live in and those that lie beyond our borders, reading the worlds that lie between the covers of a book are the essence of A Reader on Reading. The thirty-nine essays in this volume explore the crafts of reading and writing, the identity granted to us by literature, the far-reaching shadow of Jorge Luis Borges, to whom Manguel read as a young man, and the links between politics and books and between books and our bodies. The powers of censorship and intellectual curiosity, the art of translation, and those “numinous memory palaces we call libraries” also figure in this remarkable collection. For Manguel and his readers, words, in spite of everything, lend coherence to the world and offer us “a few safe places, as real as paper and as bracing as ink,” to grant us room and board in our passage.
Download or read book What Makes Day and Night written by Franklyn M. Branley and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 1986-03-26 with total page 37 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ‘Accompanied by NASA photographs and Dorros’s colorful, lively drawings, the text explains the Earth’s rotation in clear and simple terms. An experiment using a lamp as the ‘sun’ further clarifies the principles introduced.’ —BL.
Download or read book The Night Library of Sternendach written by Jessica Lévai (Author) and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In starry Sternendach, as long asThe vampire Graf has ruled this landThe Heller clan, with weapons strong asTheir wills, have killed his kindred andBeen killed in turn. The two sides nearlyDestroyed themselves. The Graf saw clearlyThe need to make the killing cease,And forced a pact to keep the peace.The youngest of the Heller factionIs Kunigunde. Trained to fightIt never suited her aright.She can¿t deny her soul¿s attractionFor books and poetry, and forThe Graf, who gave her these and more.Kunigunde is destined to become the next in a long line of Heller clan vampire hunters¿but her soul is drawn to books, poetry, and the vampire Graf. Set in 1960s Europe, The Night Library of Sternendach is an unabashedly melodramatic opera-in-sonnets that weaves a sweeping, suspenseful tale readers won't be able to put down.
Download or read book Little Learning Library written by In the Night Garden and published by Ladybird. This book was released on 2018-05-03 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explore shapes and colours, learn your ABC, and try counting with Igglepiggle and friends! This Little Learning Library contains four small chunky board books full of In the Night Garden fun. The simple early-learning concepts are brought to life with bold colours, playful text and all your favourite characters from the Night Garden.
Download or read book The Attic Nights of Aulus Gellius written by Aulus Gellius and published by . This book was released on 1927 with total page 499 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Library at Night written by Alberto Manguel and published by Vintage Canada. This book was released on 2007-10-09 with total page 355 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The starting point is a question," Alberto Manguel writes in the introduction to The Library at Night: since few can doubt that the universe is ultimately meaningless and purposeless, why do we try to give it order? After all, our efforts are surely doomed to failure. It’s hard to think of a more profound or serious subject to start with – but The Library at Night, Alberto Manguel says, is by no means a systematic answer. Rather, it is the story of the search for one. In the tradition of A History of Reading, this book is an account of Manguel’s astonishment at the variety, beauty and persistence of our efforts to shape the world and our lives, most notably through something almost as old as reading itself: libraries. The result is both intimately personal and incredibly wide-ranging: it is a fascinating study of the mysteries of libraries, a thorough analysis of their history throughout the world and an esoteric, enchanting celebration of reading. It is, perhaps most of all, a book that only Alberto Manguel could have written. The Library at Night begins with the design and construction of Alberto Manguel’s own library at his house in western France – a process that raises puzzling questions about his past and his reading habits, as well as broader ones about the nature of categories, catalogues, architecture and identity. Exploring these themes with a deliberately unsystematic brilliance, Manguel takes us to the great Library at Alexandria, and Michelangelo’s Laurentian Library in Florence; we sit with Jorge Luis Borges in his office at the National Library in Argentina, travel with donkeys carrying books into the Colombian hinterland, and discover the Fihrist, a chaotic and delightful bibliographic record of medieval Arab knowledge. There seem to be no limits to Manguel’s learning, or his ability to illuminate his investigations with magical, telling details from the past. Thematically organized and beautifully illustrated, this book considers libraries as treasure troves and architectural spaces; it looks on them as autobiographies of their owners and as statements of national identity. It examines small personal libraries and libraries that started as philanthropic ventures, and analyzes the unending promise – and defects – of virtual ones. It compares different methods of categorization (and what they imply) and libraries that have built up by chance as opposed to by conscious direction. Although it is encyclopedic (and discusses encyclopedias assembled by Diderot and fifteenth-century Chinese scholars alike) and full of concrete historical analysis (including a brief investigation of the prejudices underlying the Dewey Decimal System) this book is animated throughout by a gentle, even playful sensibility: it is governed by the browser’s logic of association and pleasure, rather than the rigid lines of scholarly theory. After all, everything in a library is connected: "As the librarians of Alexandria perhaps discovered, any single literary moment necessarily implies all others." In part this is because this is about the library at night, not during the day: this book takes in what happens after the lights go out, when the world is sleeping, when books become the rightful owners of the library and the reader is the interloper. Then all daytime order is upended: one book calls to another across the shelves, and new alliances are created across time and space. And so, as well as the best design for a reading room and the makeup of Robinson Crusoe’s library, this book dwells on more "nocturnal" subjects: fictional libraries like those carried by Count Dracula and Frankenstein’s monster; shadow libraries of lost and censored books; imaginary libraries of books not yet written. The Library at Night is a fascinating voyage through the mind of one our most beloved men of letters. It is an invitation into his memory and vast knowledge of books and civilizations, and throughout – though mostly implicitly – it is also a passionate defence of literacy, of the unique pleasures of reading, of the importance of the book. As much as anything else, The Library at Night reminds us of what a library stands for: the possibility of illumination, of a better path for our society and for us as individuals. That hope too, at the close, is replaced by something that fits this personal and eclectic book even better: something more fragile, and evanescent than illumination, though just as important. The starting point is a question. Outside theology and fantastic literature, few can doubt that the main features of our universe are its dearth of meaning and lack of discernible purpose. And yet, with bewildering optimism, we continue to assemble whatever scraps of information we can gather in scrolls and books and computer chips, on shelf after library shelf, whether material, virtual or otherwise, pathetically intent on lending the world a semblance of sense and order, while knowing perfectly well that, however much we’d like to believe the contrary, our pursuits are sadly doomed to failure. Why then do we do it? Though I knew from the start that the question would most likely remain unanswered, the quest seemed worthwhile for its own sake. This book is the story of that quest. –from The Library at Night
