Musāfir, burj, kirm (sah isti'ārah darbārah-yi khvāndan): Persian 1401

As far as we can tell, humans are the only species for whom the world of stories seems to be made, writes Alberto Manguel. We read the book of the world in different ways: we may be travelers, moving through its pages like pilgrims on their way to enlightenment. We may be hermits, retreating to our own ivory towers through reading. Or we may devour our books like burrowing worms, not to benefit from their wisdom, but simply to fill ourselves with countless words. The best-selling author of "Reading History" and "The Library at Night" weaves a chain of metaphors that describe readers and their relationship to the text that is the world in four dimensions with consummate subtlety and extraordinary breadth. Millennials with familiar and diverse figures such as Don Quixote and Dante the Pilgrim, who takes us from the depths of hell to the glimmer of heaven, as well as Prince Hamlet, who is paralyzed by his learning, and Emma Bovary, who makes mistakes. Manguel charts the ways in which literary figures and their interpretations reflect both changing attitudes toward readers and reading and recurring notions of the role of the intellectual: "We read creatures. We eat words. We are made of words. . . ." It is through words that we identify our reality and it is through words that we identify ourselves."