Lectures

Finished December 5
City of Words by Alberto Manguel
This is the 2007 collection of CBC Massey Lectures, and I had listened to one of the lectures (the second one) on Ideas one evening and was interested to read the entire series.
Manguel brings life to famous literary works, both classic and modern, by showing how they relate to the current world and our issues. He shows the relationship between identity and the "other" as it relates to both the literature and our increasingly multicultural society. He discusses the difficulties: race riots, politically-motivated murders, suicide bombings, and hate crimes. The series had me thinking about the issues in new ways and towards new solutions. I found it fascinating.