In 1998, Alberto Manguel released Into the Looking Glass Wood, a collection of essays that, in its indirect way, pays obeisance to the enduring genius of Lewis Carroll. His new collection, A Reader on Reading, patched together from pieces that previously appeared in TLS, The New York Times, Descant, and Geist, does much the same. For Manguel, Carroll’s absurdist, anarchic, nightmarish, and thrillingly inventive work “lends words” to the reader’s “unuttered experience.” The themes of the fairy tale are forever applicable to modern life. For that reason, every selection here, regardless of its content, is prefaced with a quotation pulled from the story of Alice and her Wonderland.

In these essays, Manguel acts as more of a re-reader than a reader: so many of his topics are refreshingly unfashionable, avowedly behind the times. We get substantial material on Homer, Socrates, Cervantes, Voltaire, and Robert Louis Stevenson. (One of the most recent books Manguel mentions is Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, which Manguel condemns for “its prurient descriptions of deliberately inflicted pain” – an odd stance to take after elsewhere celebrating Don Quixote, one of the most joyously ultraviolent works in the canon.)

Manguel is at his best in whimsical little essays on subjects such as punctuation or the vagaries of literary translation. He writes like a kind and equable fellow, with talents unsuited to censure and satire; his attack on churlish immigration officials in “The Further off from England” sounds a sour note, as does “Jonah and the Whale,” a clunky parable about artists’ exceptionalism and the support owed to them by the state. Much more warranted is his subtly argued denunciation of the violence that pervaded the 2005 Danish cartoon scandal, and the powerful revelations about his native Argentina, whose military junta he fled in 1969.

“As most perceptive readers will agree,” says the author, “the distinctive characteristic of the human world is its insanity.” A Reader on Reading is a sane book – reasonable, thoughtful, gentle – which offers the reader many hours of refuge.