THE PASSION OF READING EVIDENCED IN HIS WRITING.

Byline: Michiko Kakutani The New York Times

Title: ``A History of Reading''

Author: Alberto Manguel

Data: Illustrated. 372 pages, Viking; $26.95

Our rating: Four Stars

Thomas Carlyle declared that ``in books lies the soul of the whole past time,'' while Mencken complained about ``bibliobibuli,'' those compulsive readers who are ``constantly drunk on books, as other men are drunk on whisky or religion.''

Descartes hailed the reading of good books as ``conversation with the finest men of past centuries,'' while Schopenhauer equated reading ``to thinking with someone else's head instead of with one's own.'' As for Kafka, he warned that ``a book cannot take the place of the world.''

So much has been written about the pleasures and perils of reading that the undertaking announced by the title of Alberto Manguel's new book seems like a fatal act of hubris: How can one possibly attempt to write ``A History of Reading,'' much less pull it off?

Well, Manguel - a writer, editor and translator - has written a history of reading, not the history of reading perhaps, but a highly subjective and highly entertaining overview that leaves us with both a new appreciation of our own bibliomania and a deeper understanding of the role that the written word has played throughout history, from the first clay tablets (circa 4000 B.C.) found in Mesopotamia through the advent of the CD-ROM computer disk.

As Manguel himself points out, he has made no effort to be comprehensive or systematic. Rather, he rambles through the centuries and across continents, dispensing anecdotes, apercus and curious facts.

We learn that the famous library of Alexandria was nurtured by a royal decree that required all ships stopping there to surrender any books they might be carrying on board. These books were then copied for the library's collections before being returned to their owners.

We learn that there is a long tradition in the West of using random passages from Virgil and the Bible to foretell the future, and that this tradition persisted in the face of official condemnation through the 17th century. And we learn that many 19th-century Cuban cigar factories employed public readers to entertain and educate their workers; the reading material ranged from political tracts and histories to novels and modern poetry.

Manguel also introduces us to dozens of individual readers: some of them famous writers themselves, like Petrarch and Proust, others considerably less well-known.

There's Cervantes, who was such a compulsive reader that he supposedly read bits of torn paper he found in the street, and St. Augustine, who was said to read anything for the sheer delight of the sound. There's Count Libri, a 19th-century scholar who used his position with a French library commission to steal hundreds of rare and valuable books.

And there's the father of one of Manguel's childhood teachers, a scholar who knew many of the classics by heart and who offered himself as a library to be consulted by his fellow inmates when he was imprisoned in the concentration camp at Sachsenhausen.

We meet Colette on her ``bed-raft,'' where she read, wrote, ate and received friends, and Shelley, who said it was his custom ``to undress, and sit on the rocks, reading Herodotus, until the perspiration has subsided.''

In the course of making these introductions, Manguel muses freely about the mysteries and consolations of reading, and his own love affair with books. He recalls his peripatetic childhood as the son of a diplomat and remembers how books gave him ``a permanent home,'' one he could inhabit whenever and wherever he wanted.

He also recalls how experience always came to him first through books. ``When later I came across an event or circumstance or character similar to one I had read about,'' he writes, ``it usually had the slightly startling but disappointing feeling of deja vu, because I imagined that what was now taking place had already happened to me in words, had already been named.''

Reading has long been regarded as a solitary act, and in today's post-deconstructive climate, we take it for granted that reading is a two-way street, that a reader's own history and mindset will shape the interpretation of a text. Manguel reminds us that this was not always so.

He reminds us that reading was once a group activity, conducted in public: Until the invention of printing (the first Gutenberg Bible was produced between 1450 and 1455), literacy was not widespread and books were scarce.

There were no common readers in those days; instead, there were communal readings in which people gathered to listen to traveling troubadours. Those rich enough to afford their own books usually read them in the company of family and friends.

In fact, Manguel observes, private reading was long regarded with suspicion by the church as a source of idleness, daydreaming and heretical beliefs.

Although scholasticism developed as a means of reconciling the precepts of religious faith with the arguments of human reason, Manguel goes on, it soon became a way of preserving the status quo by training students ``to consider a text according to certain pre-established, officially approved criteria.''

All in all, Manguel has taken on the daunting subject of our passion for books and succeeded in turning it into a passionate book of his own.

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Photo: no caption (Book cover - A History of Reading)