Through ignorance, through faith, through intelligence, through trickery and cunning, through illumination, the reader rewrites the text with the sam… - Alberto Manguel

It is in the translation that the innocence lost after the first reading is restored under another guise, since the reader is once again faced with a new text and its attendant mystery. That is the inescapable paradox of translation, and also its wealth.

The American psychologist Julian Jaynes, in a controversial study on the origin of consciousness, argued that the bicameral mind - in which one of the hemispheres becomes specialized in silent reading - is a late development in humankind's evolution, and that the process by which this function develops is still changing.

Books read in a public library never have the same flavour as books read in the attic or the kitchen.