Life between the shelves (readings)

This book recalls a quote by the international thinker and novelist Umberto Eco, which emphasizes the importance of reading, and that whoever does not read lives one life, even if he passes seventy, while whoever reads lives for five thousand years, as reading is eternal.
The books that we read become part of our personal experiences, as if we lived them in our lives. This is how the author lived several lives jumping between the shelves of the library. The book is no longer just a friend, as the common saying goes, but rather an equivalent to the same writer who lived his life among the shelves.
The books that Shaltout read were divided between literature and thought, and between the author in Arabic and the one translated into it. He also published hundreds of reviews of the books that he liked over the course of four decades, from which he chose thirty reviews included in this book, which are according to the title of a previous book by the writer, "Sips of... "The River", so he began it with a review of the book "The Meaning of Reading" by the Dutch writer Peter Steins, who was afflicted with a rare disease that leads to the death of the infected person within a period of three to five years. He chose a number of books, re-read them, and published his reviews of them, which were not merely narratives. Influencing the facts of approaching an expected death. To prove that writing about literature is very comforting.